"'Other shows do work,' [said someone who teaches how to speak like an American]. 'Friends’ just seems to have the magic something that is even more attractive.' Fans and educators on three continents echo the sentiment, saying that 'Friends' is a near-perfect amalgam of easy-to-understand English and real-life scenarios that feel familiar even to people who live worlds away from Manhattan’s West Village. Kim Sook-han, 45, known in South Korea for her YouTube videos about teaching herself English, said that the show helped her understand the basics of American culture, including which holidays are celebrated in the United States, as well as how people there deal with conflicts between friends and family members."
Here's something linked in the article: speech instructor Rachel Smith using Rachel Green to demonstrate how to sound American (or, for us Americans, how much we know instinctively about how to sound like ourselves):
Smith has many videos, but that one concentrates on a few lines spoken by Jennifer Aniston. You learn how letters are dropped and stress and pitch are used. Very interesting! It's easy to figure out on your own why Aniston is used as a model. She sounds like a real American speaking normally. Imagine teaching non-English speakers how to talk like an American by using Jerry Seinfeld. That would be hilarious. And very wrong. Similarly, however, you could get in trouble talking like the Friends — especially if you handled stress and cadence like Chandler. Actually, all the men talk in a comically strange way.
As for learning the culture of America by watching "Friends," that's pretty tricky too! The Friends actually do a lot of things that are socially unacceptable — notably, sexual harassment in the workplace — and because they are all nice looking and mutually supportive — and because it's 20+ years in the past — you could get the wrong idea about how to act like an American.
And yet "Friends" models a very mainstream American view of how life should be lived. You struggle with your job and your love life when you're in your 20s, but then you find a good career that you like and that establishes you firmly in the middle class, and you find someone to marry who becomes the center of your life — a life with children. "Seinfeld" did not have that. It had outsiders who actively repelled conventional love, and the only one who had job satisfaction was the one whose job was to stand apart as an outsider and make comic observations about all those normal people whose lives he did not envy or admire in the slightest.
FROM THE EMAIL: Justin points me to this old Conan O’Brien clip that seems to embody the exact point I was making in my last paragraph:
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Kevin writes:
Friends always appealed to the winners or those who aspired to be winners as shown in American media. But I never paid much attention to it. Attractive, mostly successful young people who lived in spacious apartments? In my 20s I worked night shifts in print shops (in fact at age 61 I worked an overnight shift at a financial printer as late as 2018) so I could not relate.
I preferred the Seinfeld characters, who rejected that ideal of success as the Friends people would have surely rejected them.
But there's a lot on "Friends" about their money problems and terrible jobs. The theme song has the line: "You're jobs a joke/You're broke..."
But yes, if they held on and supported each other, they'd make it. That's why people with *troubles* comfort themselves watching it.
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