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Are you shy about speaking? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Levi Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5569 days ago 2268 posts - 3328 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian | Message 33 of 50 21 December 2009 at 7:26am | IP Logged | |||||
Your pronunciation is very good! Your accent is noticeable, but slight. I can tell you're not a native English speaker, but from that clip I wouldn't be able to tell what your native language was. In particular, there were three things I noticed: - Intonation. This is probably the most difficult part of the pronunciation of any language, and the most noticeable part of your accent. You can almost always tell a native from a non-native English speaker by the rhythm of their speech. Pay close attention to the pitch and length of syllables in English. There are a lot of subtle variations you may not notice without paying close attention. For instance, in American English, a vowel is typically pronounced somewhat shorter when it is followed by a voiceless consonant and somewhat longer elsewhere ("bat" is shorter than "bad", "loose" is shorter than "lose", "bait" is shorter than "bay", etc.) - The vowels. English vowels are notoriously complex and unusual, and this is the other aspect of pronunciation that makes it possible to tell most non-native speakers of English from the natives. Your vowels are pretty good, certainly a lot better than most non-native English speakers I encounter, but they are still not quite like a native speaker's. The matter of English vowels is made much more difficult by the fact that each dialect has different vowel sounds. I can tell generally where somebody is from by the way they pronounce their vowels, so if you want to sound like a native speaker you have to pick one dialect's vowel system and stick with it. You sound like you are trying to approximate a general non-Southern American accent (which is good enough, since I can't even tell most non-Southern accents apart), so try to pay very close attention to the vowels of that dialect and imitate them as best as you can. I also noticed you enunciated vowels in short words where a native English speaker would likely mumble them, e.g. "to" and "for" are usually pronounced "tuh" and "fer", not like "two" and "four" (though of course there are exceptions). - The "th" sound. There are a couple of instances where it sounds like a "d" in your speech. However, your pronunciation of "r", the other tricky consonant in English, is flawless, with the exception of your somewhat lengthened "r" in "colorrrs" (but that is a matter of intonation). Edited by Levi on 21 December 2009 at 8:03am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Muz9 Diglot Groupie Netherlands Joined 5526 days ago 84 posts - 112 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Somali | Message 34 of 50 21 December 2009 at 1:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
Thanks for the close observation, it will be useful. I think native-like speech is virtually impossible unless you have great mimicking abilities or if you live inside the country where it is spoken for at least a couple of years. The longest period I have ever been in an Anglophone country was only 3 weeks. My environment is also not really stimulating me to speak in one kind of dialect of English. In secondary school they taught me British English but I never really liked this dialect (it sounds so fake if I try to speak like that) and in the meanwhile I used to watch a lot of American movies and TV series. Most of the people I have had the opportunity to speak English with so far were mostly non-native speakers from all over the world, so now I am kind of stuck with a strange international accent. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 35 of 50 21 December 2009 at 3:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't like speaking into any electronic gadget, and that includes telephones - I don't own a mobile phone. Video cameras are totally out of the question - I'm not even comfortable being photographed. So for practical reasons I speak very little in my languages while I'm at home. But the problem is not speaking, it is my own one-way visibility and lack of personal contact with those I'm speaking to.
As I have written before I prefer waiting (and listening) before I start to speak in one of my weaker languages. I don't see this as shyness, because when I finally do decide to start speaking I don't relent, but continue speaking the foreign language even if the other person frantically tries to switch to English or some other auxiliary language. And I have no inhibitions about speaking to many people or unknown people, as long as I can find something reasonable to speak about. However there can be complications. For instance I mostly spoke Danish during my latest visit to Sweden because practically all the people I met understood Danish and there are just too many Danes around who try to speak Swedish and who sound ridiculous. I don't want to be identified with those people. However in several situations where nobody knew my nationality I spoke Swedish without any problems (no guarantee that it sounded like the real deal, though!). When I visited Iceland later the same week I did utter a few sentences in Icelandic, for instance in shops and also when I wanted to hire a PC for an hour at the tourist information. But I distinctly felt that my active Icelandic wasn't good enough for real conversations, even though I could both read and understand the language fairly easily. So I stuck to English (and in a few cases Danish). During my recent Balkan trip I had four days in the area of Greece that lies closest to Albania. There are few tourists here, so I heard almost exclusively Greek in the streets, but again I wasn't quite confident enough about my own spoken Greek. On the third day I had a conversation in Greek with a lady at my hotel in Florina who only spoke Greek, but apart from that I only switched to 'mostly Greek' during my last day in the country. If I had had a week more I could probably have claimed a (half) 'monolingual holiday', but that will have to wait until my next visit to the country. Edited by Iversen on 21 December 2009 at 3:36pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| lynxrunner Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States crittercryptics.com Joined 5924 days ago 361 posts - 461 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish*, French Studies: Russian, Swedish, Haitian Creole | Message 37 of 50 21 December 2009 at 8:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I very shy about speaking with strangers, so you can imagine that speaking with strangers in another language must be torturous for me.
When I went to Montreal for a week, I had to summon up all my courage just to order some coffee at a Starbucks (it didn't help that my family was there and that they thought my French sucked donkey posterioir, so to speak). Asking a man for video games in French was horrible because I understood about 60% of what he said, leaving me a little confused. I think I would have felt better if there wasn't anybody there because I felt, throughout the trip, that I was being judged on my French. My family is very supportive of my linguistic adventures, but I still feel nervous speaking French in front of anyone, Francophone or not. I guess you could say it's a matter of ego or lack thereof. There's a kid at school who speaks Russian (he's a year younger than me, we have the same lunch, and we're in the same club) but I'm too shy to even consider saying "Privet" because I'm scared he'll do something jerk-ass and go all out with slang and stuff (he's the kind of person that would do that, let me tell you :P). I have no problem writing in other languages. The fact that I can always go back and change it makes it better. Speaking... yes. That is a problem no matter which language I work with. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Deji Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5442 days ago 116 posts - 182 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Hindi, Bengali | Message 38 of 50 01 February 2010 at 3:36am | IP Logged | |||||
You need to learn a cutting aphorism in that language. In hindi, if asked what I know, I cast my eyes to the ceiling and recite the saying "what does a monkey know about the taste of ginger" (Bandar kya jaane adhrak ka swaad). In Bengali (which I don't really speak very well), I quote Bankim Chandra Bose (?) "Education is the formation of the whole man, etc etc.) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Deji Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5442 days ago 116 posts - 182 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Hindi, Bengali | Message 39 of 50 01 February 2010 at 3:45am | IP Logged | |||||
I think a "strange international accent" is a GOOD thing for a foreigner as long as it isn't TOO strong. I spent half an hour talking to a french guy at an Alliance Francais party. He spoke perfect English--but every time he opened his mouth I wanted to laugh. Why? Because he had an impeccable cockney accent...he would have been better off with a nice little french accent. Hey, we're foreigners. As we say in India, what to doo? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Mithridates Newbie Korea, South pagef30.com Joined 5678 days ago 21 posts - 36 votes | Message 40 of 50 01 February 2010 at 5:45am | IP Logged | |||||
I'd say it goes away when you reach the point that you can say just about anything even if you don't know the right word - say you forget the word politician but can still say "person that works in government" or "elected person" or some other way to explain it. The biggest fear is probably that you won't know what to say, and at the same time won't be able to come up with a way to explain it either and just have to stand there with your face blank. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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