Language Partners onderzoekt hoe het is gesteld met de talenkennis van onze BN’ers. Deze maand kijken we naar de Engelse talenkennis van Paul Verhoeven. Met zijn nieuwste film ‘Elle’ heeft de regisseur al verschillende prijzen en nominaties in de wacht gesleept, maar scoort hij ook met zijn Engelse talenkennis?
Paul Verhoeven
This interview was just over five minutes long but revealed lots about this dare I say it ‘national treasure’. There are noticeable issues with pronunciation and sentence structure but his display of vocabulary is delivered with aplomb.
General issues and pronunciation
At the very beginning of the interview, Paul Verhoeven almost sounded French, which kind of caught me off guard, but then after about 20 seconds in, it was quite apparent that he was in fact Dutch and his accent was quite stereotypical. With pronunciation, there are typical traits that he displays such as a very definite ‘sh’ sound throughout as opposed to ‘s’. As well as this, there is the common problem of the ‘th’ sound being delivered as ‘d’. This does stand out particularly between 20 and 40 seconds but then, as a listener, I got used to this and it seemed to become unnoticeable. There was also a point where he said ‘everything’ and it sounded more like ‘everysing’. At around 1.10, he said ‘we went immediately to Isabel’. The ‘w’ was quite a definite ‘v’ sound but this evened itself out as the interview progressed.
The grammar issues were very minor – for example at around the 55 second mark, he said ‘otherwise I wouldn’t have started this whole adventure to translate everything’ where ‘translating everything’ would have been correct.
At around 1.40 he seemed to stumble over his pronunciation of the word ‘courage’ and it seemed to impact on his whole sentence structure at that moment – he almost seemed to rethink what he was going to say and this seemed to make him stall a bit, but he recovered well.
So, they are the ‘major’ issues that I could pick up on from this interview. However, on the scale of things these ‘issues’ are relatively minor and are quite common, especially amongst the Dutch in general but do not hinder understanding or fluency at all – it was a very captivating interview which was delivered so enthusiastically and with a lot of passion.
Coherence of the interview
As mentioned above, there were absolutely no misunderstandings, which occurred during the interview due to grammar or pronunciation issues. In general, the pronunciation was very good and he displayed some excellent intonation with words such as ‘authenticity’ and ‘dedication’ at around the 1.40 stage. His range of vocabulary was commendable and used with confidence. He used words such as ‘breathtaking’, ‘dwell’, ‘abandon’ which demonstrates that he has an excellent working knowledge of the language and can use a wide range of vocabulary accurately and appropriately.
As mentioned, there was a point in particular where he seemed to hesitate and rethink his whole sentence structure around 1.40 – this being said, he recovered from this and it was fine.
Conclusions and ratings
Paul Verhoeven sounded very relaxed and extremely professional during the interview and used some nice appropriate language throughout. There were a couple of minor pronunciation issues and a few grammar bits and pieces. He came across as a true gentleman – a bit like Dick van Dyke and seemed genuinely passionate about what he does.
