What annoys you (about the news on TV) ?

One of the things that annoys me most about the French accent in English is the way they pronounce the final "-er" (like in "soeur pronounced just like the English "sir", except the "r"). The sound exist in French, yet they insist on pronouncing it "-air". I heard a French TV commentator pronounce Manchester "Manchestair".

Another thing is some people's inability not to nasalise some "an" or "en" sounds. In a documentary, a French guy visited Antwerp, and asked how people said "Anvers" ("Antwerp" in French) in Dutch. A local replied "Antwerpen", and the poor French guy was made to repeat it three times to the amusement of the local because he could not say the "An" without nasalising it like in French. Yet, had he been told that it was "Anne Twerpen", he would have pronounced it right.

So the problem of the average French speakers in deeply rooted in their brain-wiring, and is absolutely not related to their ability to say some sounds (like the Japanese, for instance). They just can't say something that is against the way their were taught to read in French. But once you change the spelling, they magically can pronounce it !!
 
The TV news all reported the killing of 16 Chinese policemen in the province of Xinjiang. I was astounded that none of the newscaster had received a training in Chinese pronunciation just days before the opening of the Olympics in Beijing. I have heard the story on at least 5 channels, and all of them pronounced Xinjiang either as "Ksin jiang" or as "Ksin yiang" instead of "Shin jiang". Some French newscasters even dropped the final "g" and nasalised the "an" like in French ! I know it's trivial, but I find it so irritating ! I don't mind so much spelling mistakes in an article on the Net, because a typing mistake is easily made. But such gross pronunciation mistakes show a lack of education and geopolitical knowledge that sound unprofessional on international news channels.
 
What annoys me the most is lack of crucial information in the news. All media are trying to go through the news as fast as possible. In-depth analisys are very rare, and even than they usually have one-side view.
 
The major news networks, be it Europe or the U.S., are filled with manipulators of reality.
 
Minty said:
I have noticed Americans /Australians or British reporters who have pronounced French or Chinese words wrong.
Take Nicolas Sarkozy for example some anchors do take effort to try to say it the way French pronounce it while others just say it in English pronunciations, but consider he is French, his name should be pronounced in French pronunciations.
Another example is the Chinese premier�fs name. His name is 溫(traditional) �� (simplified) wēn �� jiā �� (traditional) �� (simplified) bǎo , but the reporters in American, British or Australian channels call him 溫(traditional) �� (simplified) wēn �� jiāo �\ ba`o
Do you know what that mean? �� jiāo means burnt; scorched; worried; anxious sudden; while �\ ba`o means violent; cruel; to show or expose; to injure .
His first name is supposed to mean �� jiā= house, home, residence; family and ��= bǎo jewel or gem; a treasure; precious.
When talking about Turkey, the same newscasters just won't learn that the name of the Prime Minster, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is pronounced "Rejep Tayip Erdoan" ("c" is "j" in Turkish, and "ğ" is a silent letter). It's 4 years he has been PM, and he makes the news many times a year, but not a single newscaster manage to learn to say his name properly. What qualification do they need to be engaged as newscaster if not being able to pronounce foreign names properly ?
On French TV, some people will pronounce German names properly because they have learnt German, but many won't. They always get Dutch names completely mistaken (what irrites me most if when they pronounce the "Van" in family names like the French word "vent" when it actually sounds like "vanne"). When saying the name of the Belgian PM, Guy Verhofstadt", it always end up in some completely incomprehensible stuff like "Verschofstrat" or something like that. At least Francophone Belgian TV always get Dutch names right. Euronews also makes an effort. French channels are so pathetic in this regard.
Did it ever occur to you that Belgium is a country that speaks dual languages so it is not surprising the French side of Belgium learn Dutch, hence knowing how to pronounce the Dutch language? But seriously the Dutch language in France is not at all a popular language to learn, German is by far more popular, even English is much more popular to learn, but most French do not speak English much, they forgot what they learnt in schools or something.
Other popular languages to learn for the French are Spanish, Italian and landing at number 5 is actually Mandarin according to a news report.
You have no idea how many people outside of France cannot pronounce my husband's surname.
In Malaysia they couldn't pronounce his first name so they decided to call him something else, which is not his name. And for his surname which has been mine as well since I married him, even after we corrected them, they refused to correct themselves and just gone along pronouncing it the way they please!!!!! At least in Australia when corrected they apologised and corrected themselves.
In the big brother show, that racist Jade goody person didn't even bother to try to pronounce the Indian actress name Shilpa Shetty properly. Luckily Shetty was crowned the winner of the British Celebrity Big Brother, after the controversy.
I guess for people who have never studied foreign languages of the particular countries, they often cannot get the pronunciations right, reporters or not.
The last time I checked learning foreign languages was not a compulsory part of the curriculum in Bachelor of Journalism, in Australia.
Click to expand...
Points:
1) Most reporters have no clue how to pronounce foreign words. DW does the best job in this area.
2) Italian is hardly a major / popular language... :rolleyes:
3)Globally, the major European business languages are:
a) English
b) Spanish
c) French
d) Portuguese
e) German
4) I believe that every young (or old) student should learn a major foreign language, in addition to English.
Click to expand...
 
Minty said:
So are CEOs, plus their skills and talents in the field of commerce and some times the Engineering field as well. I doubt all educated people (reporters or not) can pronounce all the languages and dialects out there whether it is their own or not. Even if they are not reporters many educated people still often speak to audiences, hold seminars.
However if the non highly educated people have learnt that particular foreign language s/he is more likely to get the pronunciations right.
To be able to pronounce every languages or dialects correctly I think you need to have learnt the languages before or have learnt languages with very similar pronunciations.
I think you must have high talent in learning languages and high ability to master pronunciations, but this is not something everybody can do.
The last time I checked the requirements for journalism in terms of pronunciations (in Australia) was just to be able to say things correctly and clearly in the national language/s of the country or area.
HK reporters (or other highly educated people from HK) pronounce poorly in Mandarin.
It doesn't matter whether people are educated or not, it depends on their field of expertise, like say if they graduated from the field of mathematics, as a scientist of mathematics (besides the obvious that they need to be good at maths) they only required speak well in their own languages or the language of the university/ies they graduated from. Actually I have seen foreign lecturers of maths who can�ft speak English well but very good at maths.
Say if a maths professor is to hold a conference about maths, if s/he happens to mention a foreign scientist, very often s/he can't say their names correctly. They just pronounce it the way their language pronounces it.
A lot of the educated Australians, Americans, English professors and so forth have extreme difficulties just to get their foreign students names or places they come from�cetc pronounce correctly, whether this is in the field of journalism or not.
I wasn't talking about the Europeans who didn't know that, I was talking about the Cantonese people.
Especially the ones who live in western countries. I would expect them to know their own ethnic well but I am wrong, very wrong!!! They think the most of the Southern Hans speak Cantonese and the Northern Hans speak Mandarin�cLOL They even think there are more Cantonese speakers than Mandarin. LOOOOL. :shock: :angryfire
Yes most Europeans or white Americans couldn�ft tell between Chinese to Japanese to Koreans and so on.
In Oscar of this year they said the film �gThe Departed�h was a re-make from a Japanese film but in fact it was a re-make of the HK film�h Infernal Affairs.�h:lol:
But then again Asians are also very ignorant when it comes to white people. Comments such as white people only eat McDonalds, the only thing white people can cook is roast are just total jokes. :giggle: :silly:
That's very interesting; maybe my husband has Germanic blood line in him that he didn't know about. He isn't a historian and he never saw his family tree, but you are right it is a common believe that they think their ancestors were Gauls, but in my husband's case most of his Belgium blood are Flemish and others are of Roman descents from Northern Italy.:note: Wait but then Dutch is an ethnic made up of English and Germans I heard, :relief: well this is too complicated. DNA test will solve all the confusion.
I recently found out I could be a mix of northern and Southern Han, according to the origins of my surname...
... this explains my grandfather's sunken eyes and high bridge nose which is more of the features of the northerners...life is full of surprises.
Click to expand...
Minty:
You seem a bit angry. Exactly what are you most angry about?
 
Why can't USA newscasters speak English?

The problems Maciamo points out with French-speaking newscasters are even more pronounced in the USA. Newscasters here not only cannot pronounce words from French, German, Italian, etc., but not even SPANISH, when we have at LEAST 35 million Castilian speakers in the USA not to mention a huge country nextdoor and a dozen or so others nearby who all speak it.

The average person still can't figure out to say PÉREZ instead of puh-REZ, or even TIJUANA instead of tee-a-wanna...

But the newcasters can't either. I also sit before the TV as if I'm still in front of a class, correcting the language mistakes.

But it's not only the pronunciation... USA newscasters can't follow even the most basic grammatical rules in English.

They cannot maintain agreement in number between subject and predicate.
They often substitute the 3rd person singular preterite for the past participle.
They say, "The thing is, is that..." LOL

Ok, that's enough, I'm getting all perturbed here...:mad:
 
It's truly amazing how bad the U.S. media is with foreign words / names. Is it mainly ignorance? Insouciance? Insular thinking? Lack of exposure to non-American cultural elements? A combination of some or all of these?
 
Sensationalism. Seems like today is more important geting high peaks of audience than keeping people well-informed.
 
American news are the worst concerning name pronunciation. They change the way names really sound to look like American names.

In Greek we put a line on the vowel of every word that is pronounced "louder" for example the name Steven would be written in Greek: Στέβεν.
When Americans try to read Greek names they mess that up completely, not to mention that they change the ending of the name to sound American-like. For example: it's not Aristotle, its Aristotelis (Αριστοτέλης) with emphasis on "e" and not on "o" and a different ending.

Another example I remember vividly is from when I was having my oral examination to get the Certificate of Proficiency in English. I went inside the examination room with another girl called Despina (Δέσποινα in Greek) and the examinators asked us our names. When they were trying to pronounce her name they kept telling Δεσποίνα with emphasis on "i" instead of "e". After 5minutes of trying to say her name correctly they gave up.

Another example: our President's name is Papandreou and they call him Papandreos. A Greek singer (eurovision winner 2005) called Paparizou is always called Paparitsos by Americans, and the list goes on...

Trying to Americanize everything becomes annoying after a while and sometimes insulting...
For this reason there are many Greeks who maintain the ancient traditions by calling "english" as "barbarian-ish"! :grin:
 
American news is extremely America centric. 95% is about USA, 80% news is about actors and celebrities, or other weirdos. If one day all world vanishes and only USA survives, local people might not even notice.
One can only wish that journalists would rise to higher standards, got the names pronounced right, and educate rest of us in this matter.
The tradition of bad pronunciation comes from English language. The English went to near east on crusades and still couldn't get biblical names right with Jesus starting the list.
 
I would recommend the "Travel" channel... if I had a tv at home.
 
What i really hate about news today is that Tsunami and Earth Quake is hidden behind Kim Kardashian's butt. News have become so much of a gossip magazine that they should stop calling them a News Channel.
 
Today's TV is a window into general audience character, interest and "sole". This is what average people like to watch.
It is immediately obvious why there is so much mess in the world.
On positive note, when you go to foreign country, turn TV on, and you will learn fast about ordinary citizen in this country. In this regard TV can be educational even if they show garbage. Just don't watch too much, lol.
 
Marianne said:
They change the way names really Trying to Americanize everything becomes annoying after a while and sometimes insulting...For this reason there are many Greeks who maintain the ancient traditions by calling "english" as "barbarian-ish"! :grin:
Click to expand...

I realise this is an old thread but as annoying as it may be all this displays is a lack of knowledge of a spoken language, in this case Greek. I don't think anyone in their right mind would expect everyone to know correct pronunciations in all languages?

Along the same line I could also comment on how annoying it is when Greeks mispronounce English words and the common mistakes often made. Or the consistent battle I've had with English teachers in Greek schools over the years who have attempted to teach those mispronunciations to my children.

To a native speaker any mistake is obvious, they happen to everyone but that does not mean people should stop trying.
 
How much they lie, how much they are bias. How they brainwash people to believe another group of people are bad, etc... They have been doing this since they started making news.
 
I think that we have the media that we deserve. In this era, even with all the brainwashing, it would be quite easy to get true informations. But the 90% of people avoid it with care.
 
Something about the news that actually doesn`t annoy me but makes me laugh is when mainland news reporters try to pronounce place names in Northern Ireland..they never get it right. They stress all the syllables and end up saying it completely wrong ie:
POR..TA..VUU..GUY instead of PORTAVOGIE (Porta-vogee) ! :)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

This thread has been viewed 34643 times.

Back
Top