John Nye: belief

Transcript context

…But you don’t regret it, right? 90 percent of the time; 10 percent of the time I do. But clearly, a lot of it will have to just read a lot, read very deeply. If you are a humanities person, take some hard math and science classes. If you’re a science person, read Shakespeare. Learn a foreign language, really learn it. Spend some time. And when people learn a foreign language, in particular, I would say the one aspect of foreign language learning that’s underappreciated is accent. Most people say, “Oh, my accent is good enough, and then I’m fluent.” But in fact, for most people around the world, accent is the first thing you notice about someone when they’re speaking a foreign language. If you have bad grammar and have a very limited vocabulary, but you can say 100 basic phrases with 90 percent accurate accent, most people will say you speak fairly well. If you have, however, a fairly high degree of fluency and you have a really strong American accent, a lot of people will still perceive you as not speaking well. Without acquiring or making the effort to acquire a decent accent — I’m not talking about perfectly mimicking someone who’s fluent, but of getting a decent accent — you won’t, in my view, get a full understanding of what that language and that culture brings to you. And to close, please recommend a novel for us to read.…

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