[HN Gopher] What Is the Hardest Language in the World to Lipread...
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What Is the Hardest Language in the World to Lipread? (2020)
Author : tintinnabula
Score : 8 points
Date : 2021-04-19 21:18 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.atlasobscura.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.atlasobscura.com)
| retrac wrote:
| Purely subjectively, as someone with a hearing loss who has
| learned a couple other languages (plus teaching myself how to
| speak my native English understandably) I do think that different
| languages may be easier or harder for people to lipread, at least
| in my situation.
|
| Mandarin encodes a great deal of the information into the vowel
| including the tone. This is only partly visible, at best. (But I
| can hear this part just fine.) The various initial consonants are
| all visible on the lips. With the exception of the the aspiration
| contrast (Pinyin t/d, g/k etc.) which is almost invisible, and
| probably poses the biggest challenge. Voicing contrast like in
| English or French is also very hard to see. (But in my case
| easier to hear.) On the other hand, I find both for lipreading
| and hearing in English or French, it is the final consonants in
| syllables and the contrast between various consonant clusters I
| tend to lose.
|
| I'm not sure which is innately harder, they definitely pose
| different challenges.
|
| As an aside, doing drills with good quality video of speakers
| exercising visually minimal pairs (something like "tea" and
| "deal" in English) is good practice for this.
| FirstLvR wrote:
| must be Chilean language... that thing is not spanish
| gerdesj wrote:
| Closer to my home: my mum, Devonion, could make herself nearly
| unintelligible to me by speaking as she did as a young girl.
| That's my mum, not a random stranger from another country 8)
|
| I'm no expert but I do know that the French spoken in Quebec is
| rather different than that spoken in France, which of course
| has many varieties of "French". There's also whatever is spoken
| in Brittany (Breton?) which I think is closer to
| Welsh/Cornish/Irish/Scottish ie Brythonic languages than
| English or French.
|
| English is a right old mish mash of loosely coupled dialects,
| patois, pidgins and whatever linguists call the other varieties
| and vagaries. I gather that the easiest variety of English to
| understand for non native speakers, in general is the Dublin
| accent.
|
| I know it isn't brummie because I remember seeing big Tex (he
| wore a stetson on his 10 gallon head) on a Norwegian cruise out
| of Miami heckling a comic on stage. I ended up translating. I
| kept it simple and told Tex that he was from Birmingham,
| England because trying to explain the "Black Country" was
| likely to be tricky. I can just about tell the difference
| between a brummie and a yam yam accent. The next act was a
| geordie and I gave up and suggested to Tex that we hit the bar.
|
| Now, what have you got against Chilean?
| js2 wrote:
| I recently watched a Turkish movie and I guess it's the first
| time I've listened to Turkish for an extended period. That
| language is a chameleon.
| arunc wrote:
| Just a personal opinion, but it must be French.
| umvi wrote:
| Probably something like stephen hawking's voice synth. His lips
| don't even move, you would have to interpret purely from twitches
| in his neck
| DC1350 wrote:
| Lip reading ASL is pretty tough
| klysm wrote:
| Nice, but I wonder to what degree mouthing the corresponding
| words aids in ASL communication?
| new299 wrote:
| The article is interesting, but the title is click bait:
|
| "So where does that leave us in our central question of which
| language is the hardest to understand from visual cues? "The
| short answer is, we don't know," says Masapollo."
| JulianWasTaken wrote:
| Yeah bit of a disappointment...
|
| Especially given that even the paragraphs following that
| sentence are essentially "well maybe it's X Y or Z because
| people there have mustaches".
|
| I'm sure answering this question scientifically is hard but I'd
| love to know something like what happens if you get N native
| speakers from K languages and take a sentence and a paragraph
| from each language and ask the N native speakers what they see
| (and compare the results).
| aflag wrote:
| Indeed, the least I was expecting was some kind of graph
| showing how accurate lip readers in each language are or
| something.
| thanhhaimai wrote:
| It may not be the top, but heavily tonal languages like
| Vietnamese may be near the top:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_language
|
| A lot of sounds and nuances are not visible at the lip level. You
| still may be able to guess something based on the context, but an
| ML model based purely on lip visual will fail pretty hard.
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