Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

At a conference I was attending in Toronto this week, I noticed that I had a hard time understanding speakers who had a foreign accent. This is weird, because I worked with international students until I changed jobs recently, and some had foreign accents that were sometimes quite strong but I had no difficulties understanding them. Maybe I am becoming deaf or maybe it’s just the lack of opportunities to hear these accents that makes me stupid 😦 Yes, I always found people who can’t understand foreign accents stupid, so there I am, one of these stupid people!

All this to say that the narrator of this book is the author, who is definitely Italian and thus has an Italian accent. I can tell that he was coached on his pronunciation for this book, but he still makes a few mistakes that are typical to Italian and French speakers, like the S that he pronounces Z in many words like bazic instead of basic, and dezintegrate, and increazing. He also says thouGT, instead of thout (for thought). Like francophones, too, he has a hard time with long vowels and an initial H, so he says it or sometimes hit instead of « heat » (which is pronounced with a strong H at the beginning and a long iiiii sound), and lip instead of leap (liiiip). And finally, he makes a mistake that francophones don’t make but hispanophones do, too: he can’t say two or three consonants together, as in collapst (collapsed) so he says collapsèd, releasèd and nourishèd, and an initial S is pronounced Z, as in zlow instead of slow. I am not criticizing him at all, I just miss interacting with people who come from all kinds of cultures and who speak all kinds of languages, and I also miss talking about linguistics!

Anyway, this book is super short, not even 2 hours of listening time, and super complex because it talks about quantum physics, elementary particles, gravity, relativity, black holes, and all kinds of stuff that is fascinating but not exactly easy to understand. He tries to explain things in an easy manner, and I did understand a few things, but I will have to re-listen to this book a few times to really understand it all.

It was a fun and different type of story than I usually listen to, and I enjoyed the change of topic and pace, and the accent 🙂