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Comment by xiaoma | Hacker News Reader

I listened to the audio version of Outliers a while back. One lengthy section was about how Chinese children have an advantage in learning math over English speaking children due to the regularity and brevity of the number words.

Gladwell gave examples in which he absolutely murdered the pronunciation of the number 7. I'm not talking about tone problems. He pronounced it as "kwee". It was clear that he hadn't even bothered to listen to the number words that he devoted a section of his book to.

Of course I don't expect someone who isn't a student of a language to speak it well, but he could have at least gone to wikipedia or chinesepod and listened to the numbers once or twice!

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Here's the section in question: http://www.gladwell.com/outliers/outliers_excerpt3.html

Personally, I find it incredibly strange for someone to criticize an author for mispronouncing a single syllable word from a language he presumably doesn't know while reading an excerpt of a book he didn't write. He doesn't claim expertise and acknowledges his sources, who are experts, and he explicitly states that these are their arguments. What's the problem?

It's like saying that Star Track is one of your favorite shows. In the scheme of things, it doesn't matter but goddamn is it annoying to people who care.

"It's like saying that Star Track is one of your favorite shows"

No, it's not. It's like someone who doesn't know english mispronouncing a single syllable english word while reading an excerpt of a non-english book written by someone else that he quoted in his non-english book. And criticism of it would be just as silly.

There are degrees. This error isn't like an English speaker discussing French pronouns and commenting on the pronunciation of "moi" and saying it as "moo-ah". Gladwell's error was like saying it as "moy", rhyming with "toy".

The first error is completely understandable. The second one can't help but change one's perception of the writer... if one has any familiarity at all with the topic being discussed. For those who know nothing about it, it would seem like a triviality, much like "misspelling" the word igon values.

The only thing this is analogous to is the mispronunciation of a single syllable english word by a chinese author who doesn't speak english quoting a chinese language passage from another author while discussing their work. And it wouldn't make any sense to criticize that either.

"For those who know nothing about it, it would seem like a triviality"

English is my first language. If a speaker didn't speak english, was quoting a non-english passage from someone else and mispronounced the english word "two" as "swoh" I wouldn't think any less of him or his work, but I would think less of someone who thought it worthy of this kind of criticism.

He was discussing the phonetic properties of Chinese words. If he'd just missed the tone or if he'd even have gotten remotely close, it wouldn't have been so bad.

The problem is that he decided to include the excerpt in his argument and didn't even bother to listen to the numbers, even when it would have been simple to do so if he wanted.

Edit: I guess the problem is the same as the igon values. He regularly writes with an air of authority about things he doesn't really have much understanding of. He's limited to quoting others' arguments as a journalist would.

"quoting others' arguments as a journalist would."

He writes "as a journalist would" because he is a journalist.

I'm not sure why anyone would read his writing as much of anything else, nor why writing as a journalist is a bad thing.

As a westerner with extremely limited exposure to asian languages, I'm not sure if I would do any better. I found a website where I can listen to (I hope) a native speaker say "seven" in Chinese. The way I would say it would be similar to the English word "tea."

In Mandarin it's much closer to "chee" (elongated "chi") than it is to "tea"

I thought I heard a "ch" sound, but I have difficulty distinguishing it. Anyway, this supports my point that people who aren't accustomed to a family of languages will take more than a few hours to get pronunciation of even a single word correct.

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