Anyway, Akeelah and the Bee shows a lot of different aspects of kids’ lives and attitudes toward learning. It’s got wealthy suburban parents putting so much pressure on their kids that the kids are miserable. In another part of town, it shows ghetto kids being discouraged by their families and friends from realizing their talents, because they think defeat and humiliation are just around the corner. One girl who is excelling there has a lot of trouble keeping her friends, and there is a lot of pressure on her not to make friends in other neighborhoods.
In one of the most interesting scenes, the girl from the ghetto is riding the bus through a richer neighborhood and looking out the window. Her own neighborhood is a miserable place, where crime and murder are daily worries. Suddenly she sees some wealthy suburban girls riding in a convertible and getting excited over the romanticized view of ghetto life they’re hearing in a rap song. She’s got to be afraid a lot of the time, and here are these rich girls imagining those miserable conditions are cool.
Anyway, it’s not a bad movie. See it, if you have a chance.
It sounds like an interesting film. Precisely today (which is now yesterday for me) I saw a snatch of it on TV, as there was a feature about Starbucks Caf?s around the world and this is their first venture into film.
Talking about title translations which don’t make sense, there is something worse: titles that reveal the end of the film or that are a synopsis of the plot! Some mythical or far-fetched translations into Spanish are: Rosemary’s Baby — La semilla del diablo (The Devil’s Seed), Some Like It Hot — Con faldas y a lo loco (With Skirts and Crazily), After Hours — ?Jo, qu? noche! (Gosh, What a Night!), Sunset Boulevard – El crep?sculo de los dioses (Twilight of the Gods), The Lawnmower Man — El Jardinero Asesino Inocente (The Innocent Murdering Gardner!!), The Changeling — Al final de la escalera (At the End of the Stairs), The Firm — La tapadera (The Front), The Sound of Music — Sonrisas y l?grimas (Smiles and Tears), Child’s Play — Mu?eco diab?lico (Devilish Doll), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind — ?Olv?date de m?! (Forget Me). Some of them remind me of the joke in one of Alan’s word stories (Jokes).
By “dubbing” I meant not naming the film, but how they would get the story and the dialogue to make sense in a language that has phonetic spelling. I’ve been told that American shows that feature spelling bees are unintentionally funny in some countries because of that.
How did they name the sequels to that movie? There was one called “Bride of Chuckie” (a takeoff on “Bride of Frankenstein”) and the most recent one was “Seed of Chuckie”.
Anyway, I think that if a book or film is ruined by knowing the end of the story, then it’s not a good one. I completely don’t care if I know the whole plot before a read a book or see a film.
What are spelling bees, Jamie? I have never heard of that!! This is a proof that this particular film title doesn’t really make sense to me – and I wasn’t even aware of it until I read your second post on the subject!
I had to learn spelling at school, because French is not a phonetic language (it may come close to English in that!): there are silent letters and different ways to pronounce the same letters. In Spanish, however, you simply don’t need to spell at all. You will often hear: “Se escribe como suena” (you spell it as it sounds). That makes it all the more complicated to Spanish students of English, who should always learn to spell first of all.
A spelling bee is a spelling contest. There is a national spelling bee in America every year (which Jamie mentioned in his first post). Wikipedia has a good write-up: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spelling_bee
English isn’t phonetic and therefore spelling words properly in English is often very difficult. So, whereas winning a spelling contest in English is quite an accomplishment, winning a spelling contest in e.g. German might be seen as nothing terribly special.
But a “bee” isn’t always a contest. It can simply be a social gathering centered on a specific activity.
Or, of course, it can also be a bee :lol: (an insect).
A spelling bee is a contest in which kids stand up one by one and are asked to spell a word aloud. If they get it wrong, they sit down and are out of the competition. The contest continues, with more and more words, until there is only one winner left.
In my school everyone started out standing until they spelled a word wrong, and then they sat down. Eventually only one kid was left standing.
Actually, “spelling the way it sounds” isn’t so easy in Spanish. The letters I get from a Guatemalan second-grader attest to this.
You’re right, Jamie, and I’m glad you pointed that out. This is because some sounds can be transcribed in two different ways. in Castilian Spanish, we are not supposed to pronounce the ‘b’ and the ‘v’ differently, but rather like a very soft ‘b’ (pronouncing the ‘v’ as in English is not correct). Then there is the ‘s’ and the ‘z’ (Latin Americans tend to make more spelling mistakes with these, since they use the same ‘s’ sound for both letters – as in some regions of Spain). Sometimes the ‘y’ and the ‘ll’ are confused with each other, because they are not pronounced correctly – I’m not sure about America, but in Spain, only in a few regions, like Castilla y Le?n, do they pronounce the ‘ll’ properly, i.e. like the Italian ‘gli’ (most people just render the sound like ‘y’, that is like the German ‘j’). One more confusing sound is the ‘j’/‘g’. You also have to know whether you need an ‘n’ or an ‘m’ after some vowels and before some consonants. I was going to forget the ‘h’, which is always silent in Spanish. Oh, and knowing when to write one or two ‘rs’ might also be complicated at first. Last but not least, there are the accents on vowels – fortunately, we have rules for those!
We are taught to pronounce it as a [b] at the beginning of a word in most cases, and after vowels as a bilabial fricative, which is phonetically transcribed as [?]. In fact, in Spanish all voiced stops are pronounced as fricatives after a vowel, theoretically, right?
From what I’ve been taught, both of these letters are pronounced as [z] before a voiced consonant and as [s] everywhere else.
My Latin American students pronounce Y and LL in Spanish in many different ways. They most commonly pronounce it like an English J. Others pronounce it as [y]. Some from Colombia pronounce it like an English ZH. The people from Argentina pronounce LL like English SH.
When we are taught Spanish in the US, we are taught to understand that [lyi] pronounciation of LL, but not to pronounce it. I always thought it was some minority dialect pronunciation.
It’s not confusing. J is pronounced [h], or more like [?], and G is pronounced the same way before a front vowel. Elsewhere G is pronounced as [g]. Maybe there’s something I’m missing.
I have a habit of deleting the D on the end of words like “Usted” and of pronouncing word-final N like an English NG.
And what am I doing talking about what “we are taught” about Spanish in the US? That’s stupid. I’ve never taken a lesson. I learned from government multimedia courses.
We don’t really have the [z] sound in Spanish and our ‘s’ doesn’t sound at all like yours. The Spanish [s] varies from one country to another: in Spain it tends to have a whistling sound and it’s often similar to the English [sh], but softer. In most of Spain the ‘z’ is interdental or lisped, i.e. pronounced as [th] in ‘thick’. So is the ‘c’ before an ‘e’ or an ‘i’.
What I meant is that these two letters may be confused in writing when they are both pronounced the same, that is like [kh] as in loch.
And like you, millions of Spanish speakers do, though not in all regions or countries. Something many natives do (and this is definitely not good Spanish!) is pronounce the final ‘d’ (often in ‘usted’ or ‘Madrid’) like a [th]. This reminds me of another vulgarism: if you ever hear the word ‘puff’, it’s another version of the word ‘pub’!!
The English [s] is alveolar, and the Spanish [s] is apico-alveolar, with the tongue formed to more of a point than in English, which is why it sounds more like an SH. In large parts of Latin America, the letters S and Z are pronounced the same, which means as [z] before a voiced consonant and as [s] elsewhere. So they do have the sound [z], but as a variant of /s/.
I think you’ve got the tongue too far back. The sound at the end of “loch” is , a voiceless velar fricative. At least in the Spanish I hear, the J is pronounced closer to the hard palate, so as [?], which is a voiceless palatal fricative, as in German “ich”.
These exchanges are fun! I’m really enjoying it! It almost makes up for not having studied linguistics. Well, it’s more like you’ve done all the hard work and now I have the privilege of benefiting from your knowledge!
The Spanish you hear must be Latin American, which is only logical. The Mexicans, for instance, do pronounce the ‘j’ as in the German ‘ich’, whereas the Spaniards say it exactly as in the German ‘Bauch’ or ‘Loch’. If you hear the way some Spanish pronounce the English ‘h’, you will see what I mean!
I have seen this movie a month ago and I really liked it .I liked the end when she spelled a word in a wrong way just to let the other boy win.
please can you anyone tell me if I have to say I have seen this movie or I saw this movie?
and when I want to talk about a movie I have seen do I use the simple present or simple past?