this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2024
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xkcd #2942: Fluid Speech

https://xkcd.com/2942

explainxkcd.com for #2942

Alt text:

Thank you to linguist Gretchen McCulloch for teaching me about phonetic assimilation, and for teaching me that if you stand around in public reading texts from a linguist and murmuring example phrases to yourself, people will eventually ask if you're okay.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 months ago

I once did an English language vocabulary test that yielded that I'm amongst the top 0.01% in terms of amount of English-language vocabulary.

English is not my mother tongue and I still and often make mistakes in the use of "in"-vs-"on" or even in certain forms of past tense.

However I read a lot in English, in various areas of knowledge, plus it turns out lots of really obscure words in English are pretty much the same as a the word in some other language I know or even pretty much the Latin word, so when I didn't know that was the English word for that, I can often guess the meaning.

All this to say that I absolutelly agree with you that it's a reading thing, plus at more specialized language level, the "knowledge of foreign languages" also has some impact.