跟讀練習: How do some languages not have tense? - 通過影片學習英語口語
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If I asked you to explain the difference between I ate dinner and I was eating dinner,
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you'd probably tell me they both happened in the past, and you'd be right.
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In linguistics, we call the when of a sentence tense.
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But there's a second, much more subtle layer of meaning hidden in those sentences
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that English speakers use every day without ever realizing it.
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Bernard Comrie still has the classic definition of it from his 1976 sequel to his high-stakes nail-biting thriller,
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Tense, where he explains it simply as the internal temporal constituency of a situation.
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And some languages use it without ever using tense at all.
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In plain English, it's called aspect.
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If you're new to the channel, welcome.
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I'm Dr. Taylor Jones.
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I've got a PhD in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania.
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And on the channel, I discuss everything relating to language, linguistics, language learning, and culture.
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If you're into those topics, be sure to subscribe and ring the bell for notifications.
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Today, we're talking about what's weirdly one of the hardest concepts for people to get.
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This is Language Jones.
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I bought Airfare to Italy last month, and my old move would have been to just not look at my accounts for a while.
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Instead, I opened Monarch.
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One clean dashboard.
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Accounts, spending, net worth, debt payoff progress, recurring bills, all in one view.
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No hopping between four banking apps to piece it all together.
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Setup was fast.
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Monarch syncs with over 13,000 institutions, so my banks, credit cards, and brokerage all connected securely in one sitting.
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What I actually needed to know was whether that purchase set me back.
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Monarch's AI pulled from my real financial data and explained what changed.
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Two minutes, no spreadsheet.
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The budgeting's flexible, not rigid.
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Fixed versus flexible spending, my own rules and categories.
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And if you're managing money with a partner, you both see the same picture.
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No ads, no selling my data.
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I'm the customer, not the product.
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And it's the same experience on web and mobile.
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Monarch.com in the description, use my promo code or scan the QR code on screen.
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Now back to the video.
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Okay, so what the fuck is Aspect?
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As with most linguistics jargon, the name sounds kind of made up.
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While tense tells you when something happened, past, present, or future, aspect tells you how that event occupies mental time.
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Is it a single completed point?
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Is it an ongoing process?
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Is it a habit that happens over and over?
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Today, we're going to look at the two core kinds of aspects that languages, from English to Russian to Mandarin, have to deal with.
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The perfective and the imperfective.
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To visualize this, imagine you're looking at a parade.
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If you're standing on a skyscraper, looking down at the entire parade route from start to finish, you see the parade as a single complete event.
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If you're looking down from the space station, the whole thing is an undisentanglable dot.
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This is the perfective aspect.
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You aren't interested in the individual dancers, the specific timing of the drums.
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You're not interested in who's going by right now.
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That question doesn't even make sense.
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Instead, you're looking at the event as an unanalyzable black box or a single dot on a timeline.
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In English, we usually show this with a simple past.
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I wrote the book.
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I read the book.
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I ate the book.
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It's done.
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The concept's a whole.
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But now imagine you're standing on the sidewalk right in the middle of the noise of that parade.
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You see the floats passing by, you see the movement, and you're right in the thick of the action.
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You don't see the beginning or the end necessarily.
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You see the internal constituency, the internal texture of the event.
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This is the imperfective aspect.
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In English, we often use the ing form for this.
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I was writing the book.
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I was eating the book.
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This distinction is the foundation of almost everything we do with verbs.
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But where it gets really interesting is how different languages choose to mark these categories.
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In English, we're actually a bit of a strange outlier.
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We love the progressive aspect, that am doing or was doing construction.
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We use it constantly to show that an action is currently unfolding.
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By the way, see how am doing is the present tense and was doing is the past tense?
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This stuff is distinct from tense and can overlap with, interact with, or totally ignore tense.
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Some languages like
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Mandarin don't even have tenses at all.
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If you want to say when something happened, you legit just say when it happened or will happen, but the aspect marker doesn't change.
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All you students of Mandarin out there, le is not a past tense marker.
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But also there's a conceptual reason we might think of one as related to the other.
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Perfective aspect for things that are done
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and dusted is just statistically more likely to co-occur with things
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that happened in the past than things that will happen to completion in the future.
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That's how Hebrew switched from a spectral system in Biblical Hebrew to a tense system in Modern Hebrew,
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starting sometime maybe in the Mishinaic period and running to completion sometime around the 1500s, but definitely before what we think of as Modern Hebrew.
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There's a lot of weird conspiracy theories online that are totally unhinged, so if you want a rundown of the history of Hebrew,
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check out my video on that, link in the description.
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Anyway, if you look at a language like Russian, aspect is the absolute king of the grammar system.
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Forget case marking.
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Slavic aspect is the final boss.
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Almost every verb in Russian comes in a pair, except verbs of motion which come in even more groupings.
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Some say too many.
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But for those pairs, there's a perfective version and an imperfective version.
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You can't even say the word to eat without first deciding
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if you're talking about the process of eating or the result of having finished the meal.
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And then there's the habitual aspect.
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This is a subtype of the imperfective.
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If I say I used to walk to work, I'm not talking about one specific walk.
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I'm talking about a pattern of behavior that's stretched across time.
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In those days, I walked to work.
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Does the same thing with the simple past, but it adds a phrase that gives you the right reading.
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Used to is just a grammatical structure that encodes the habituality.
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Some languages have a specific piece of morphology, a little prefix or suffix that they stick onto the verb solely to signal,
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hey, this isn't a one-time thing.
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It's a habit.
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In African American English, it's been argued for almost 60 years that one function of so-called invariant B, as in he be working every week,
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is as a habituality marker in the present tense by analogy with like used to.
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Although I just read a fantastic 2019 dissertation that makes a very interesting argument for a different interpretation.
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I've got a video on that.
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Link is in the description.
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And I'll link at the end too.
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Be sure to check it out.
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Now, why does this matter?
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Why did Comrie and other linguists spend hundreds of pages and decades of their careers obsessing over this?
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One answer is because aspect allows us to zoom in and zoom out on life.
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Think about how we tell stories.
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We use the imperfective to set the scene, the background of the movie.
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The sun was shining, the birds were singing, and I was drinking my coffee.
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These are ongoing states.
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Then we use the perfective to trigger the action or the foreground.
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Suddenly, the phone rang.
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By switching aspects, you're telling the listener's brain which information is just the background and which information is the plot moving forward.
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Without aspect, our stories would be just a flat list of facts with no rhythm or depth.
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What always messed me up at first was the fact that basically anything can be either, depending on your framing.
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So when I said, suddenly the phone rang, I can continue, the phone was ringing when I dropped my coffee.
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It's the same event in the world, the same instance of the phone ringing,
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but I choose how to represent it in terms of duration and relationship to other events.
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One of the trickiest things about learning a new language is realizing
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that they don't all draw the lines in the same place.
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Some languages, like
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Mandarin Chinese, don't use tense at all.
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They don't change the verb for past or future.
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Instead, they rely entirely on aspect particles like le or zhe to tell you if an action is completed or ongoing.
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They care way more about the shape of the event than the date on the calendar.
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And by care, I mean encode in the grammar.
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You can absolutely just tell somebody the date on the calendar or use a deictic term like yesterday or tomorrow.
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That's what people actually do.
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So the next time you're writing a text or telling a story, pay attention to your verbs.
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Are you looking at the parade from the sidewalk or from the skyscraper?
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Did I just help you ace high school Spanish?
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Probably.
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Once you start seeing aspect, you realize that language is constantly shifting focus to show us how life actually feels as it unfolds.
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That's what we're using language to do.
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And the reason people like Comrie study it is
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that there's a lot to be learned from how languages choose to encode some information and not other information.
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How they force us to attend to certain aspects of our actions and our lives, pun very much intended.
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Which language's aspect system has been the hardest for you to wrap your head around, and why is it Russian?
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For me, it's always the Slavic perfective pairs,
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especially once you get into verbs of motion where it matters whether everybody is going in the same direction
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or whether it's one-way trip or a two-way trip.
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Let me know in the comments below.
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Hit the like button if you learned something new about your own speech today.
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And don't forget to subscribe.
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If you like what I'm doing with the channel,
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you can always support it right here on YouTube with super thanks or over on Patreon at patreon.com slash languagejones.
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Please leave me a comment.
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They are great for the algorithm.
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And until next time, happy learning.
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本課的詞彙與口語要點
這節口語課以影片“How do some languages not have tense?”為素材。 影片中反覆出現的詞有：aspect, language, tense, verb, event。 這段影片共有 154 個句子、1769 個單詞可供跟讀。 講話部分時長為 8:56。 說話人語速較快，每分鐘約 198 個詞，會出現較多連讀和弱讀。 只有 81% 的單詞屬於英語最常用的 3,000 詞，詞彙難度較高。
影片中的重點詞彙
影片中 15 個值得學習的單詞，附發音和釋義：
| 單詞 | 發音 | 釋義 |
|---|---|---|
| aspect 名詞 | /ˈæspɛkt/ | 方面 |
| tense 名詞 | /tɛns/ | 時態 /時態, 時制 /時制 |
| verb 名詞 | /vɝb/ | 動詞 /動詞 |
| parade 名詞 | /pəˈrɑd/ | 遊行 /遊行, 巡遊 /巡遊 |
| ongoing 形容詞 | /ɒnˈɡəʊ.ɪŋ/ | 進行中的 /進行中的 |
| calendar 名詞 | /ˈkæl.ən.də/ | 日曆 /日曆, 曆 /歷 |
| habit 名詞 | /ˈhæb.ɪt/ | 習慣 /習慣 |
| grammar 名詞 | /ˈɡɹæm.ə(ɹ)/ | 語法 /語法, 文法 |
| sometime 副詞 | /ˈsʌmˌtaɪm/ | 日後 /日後, 某時 /某時 |
| flexible 形容詞 | /ˈflɛk.sɪ.bəl/ | 靈活 /靈活 |
| subscribe 動詞 | /səbˈskɹaɪb/ | 簽署 /簽署 |
| constituency 名詞 | /kənˈstɪt͡ʃu.ənsi/ | 選區 /選區 |
| sidewalk 名詞 | /ˈsaɪdwɔk/ | 人行道, 步道 |
| topic 名詞 | /ˈtɑpɪk/ | 主題 /主題, 話題 /話題 |
| ignore 動詞 | /ɪɡˈnɔː/ | 無視 /無視, 忽略 |
影片中出現的短語動詞
| 單詞 | 發音 | 釋義 |
|---|---|---|
| check out 動詞 | 退房 | |
| make up 動詞 | /ˌmeɪk ˈʌp/ | 組成 /組成 |
值得反覆跟讀的句子
影片中簡短而完整的句子，可以直接用在日常對話裡：
- If you're new to the channel, welcome.
- I'm the customer, not the product.
- To visualize this, imagine you're looking at a parade.
- You're not interested in who's going by right now.
- You don't see the beginning or the end necessarily.
影片中的語法
說話人最常用的結構，並附上影片中的原話：
| 結構 | 影片中的用法 |
|---|---|
| “used to” used to + 動詞 — 過去的習慣或狀態，現在已不再如此 | used to walk · Used to is |
| 被動語態 be + 過去分詞 — 強調發生了什麼，而不是誰做的 | been argued · is completed · be learned |
| 現在完成時 have/has + 過去分詞 — 過去發生但與現在仍有關聯的事 | it's been argued · has been |
需要注意的發音
說話人用了 38 次縮略和弱讀形式，例如 you're, don't, I'm。請按聽到的簡短形式來說。
- “th” 音: thick /θɪk/, rhythm /ˈɹɪð.əm/, algorithm /ˈælɡəɹɪðm̩/, thriller /ˈθɹɪ.lə/
- “sh” 和 “zh” 音: completion /kəmˈpliː.ʃən/, institution /ˌɪn.stɪˈtʃuː.ʃən/, interpretation /ɪnˌtɜːpɹəˈteɪʃən/, shine /ʃaɪn/, duration /dʒʊˈɹeɪ.ʃən/
- 長單詞——注意重音位置: constituency /kənˈstɪt͡ʃu.ənsi/, necessarily /ˌnɛs.əˈsɛɹ.ə.li/, institution /ˌɪn.stɪˈtʃuː.ʃən/, conspiracy /kənˈspɪɹəsi/, interpretation /ɪnˌtɜːpɹəˈteɪʃən/
中文母語者容易讀錯的音：
- /v/ — 不要讀成 /w/，上齒輕觸下唇: verb /vɝb/, progressive /pɹəˈɡɹɛsɪv/, versus /ˈvɝsəs/, overlap /ˌəʊvəˈlæp/, perfective /pə(ɹ)ˈfɛktɪv/
- 詞尾子音 — 要讀清楚，後面不要加母音: aspect /ˈæspɛkt/, tense /tɛns/, verb /vɝb/, parade /pəˈrɑd/, habit /ˈhæb.ɪt/
- /r/ 和 /l/ 的區別: necessarily /ˌnɛs.əˈsɛɹ.ə.li/, rely /ɹɪˈlaɪ/, relate /ɹɪˈleɪt/, algorithm /ˈælɡəɹɪðm̩/, thriller /ˈθɹɪ.lə/
如何用這段影片練習
- 先完整聽一遍影片，不要開口，記下不認識的單詞。
- 先用 0.75 倍速逐句跟讀，熟練之後再回到正常速度。
- 錄下自己的聲音並與原聲對比，特別注意 aspect, tense, verb 這類單詞。
什麼是跟讀法？
跟讀法 (Shadowing) 是一種有科學依據的語言學習技巧，最初開發用於專業口譯員的培訓，並由多語言者Alexander Arguelles博士普及。這個方法簡單而強大：您在聽英語母語原聲的同時立即大聲重複——就像是一個延遲1-2秒緊跟說話者的影子。與被動聽力或語法練習不同，跟讀法強迫您的大腦和口腔肌肉同時處理並模模擬實的講話模式。研究表明它能顯著提高發音準確性，語調，節奏，連讀，聽力理解和口語流利度——使其成為雅思口語備考和真實英語交流最有效的方法之一。