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Accent difficulties at different levels | ||
Tags: Language Level Satisfaction | Accent | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| glidefloss Senior Member United States Joined 5969 days ago 138 posts - 154 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 1 of 9 19 March 2015 at 3:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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Do different accents get easier to understand the more you develop your language?
For instance, I'm watching a lot of dubbed shows in Spanish. The accent is Mexican, but (to me) very unlike the accent I hear living in Mexico. Mexicans have told me the same thing. It's much, much easier for me to understand dubbed shows than it is my roommate. People who are from farther away in Mexico are even harder for me to understand, and I'm assuming people from other countries would be very difficult for me. Is this something I should work on consciously? I could listen to Mexican radio that has more natural accents, but I would find it boring. Will it get easier as I go along? For instance, I don't think native Spanish speakers have much trouble understanding other accents. Thanks. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5263 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 2 of 9 19 March 2015 at 5:11pm | IP Logged | ||
You are a native US English-speaker. Do you have trouble understanding different accents in English? It's a matter of having a good base in the language first and making an effort to understand. At first it may be more difficult but after a short while your brain gets used to what it's hearing as English. It's hard to advise you without knowing your level. Just learn Spanish. Listen a lot to a lot of Spanish on a daily basis, no matter where it may come from. Make sure the input you get is comprehensible. You've been on the forum long enough to know what comprehensible input means. You can't learn all the accents at the same time. In this way you can build a good base upon which you can build more. Once you have achieved a high level in general Spanish, then you can make an effort to expose yourself to different accents and get used to them by making a conscious effort to do so. It is something that will get better over time with more listening and exposure. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 3 of 9 19 March 2015 at 7:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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We understand language in huge part because of what we are able to expect. The better we know a foreign language, the better sense we have of what input is plausible. If you are trying to understand an accent you've never heard before -- provided you know the language well enough to have a good sense of what to expect -- then your brain will establish links between the language's sounds and the way they are realized in that given accent. As you increase your knowledge of a language and as you are exposed to an accent, you will inevitably improve your understanding of it. In a general sense, it's a good idea to expose yourself to different accents, but I don't think deliberate work much beyond deliberate exposure will be necessary.
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| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4291 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 4 of 9 19 March 2015 at 8:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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Some accents might be more difficult in both native language and foreign language,
although just hearing them repeatedly should bridge the gap in understanding. Some might still be more problematic than others, for example, my grandmother, native Anglophone, first heard a North American accent in 1969. She still struggles with American and Canadian accents to this day, and if has to speak with them, has to ask them to repeat several times, especially with the West Coast accents (from Vancouver/Victoria down Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, to Los Angeles) because they swallow words often. Spanish has many different accents, but some might still prove difficult. I have learnt this language since 2003 using Peninsular materials, but the Cuban and Dominican accents give me serious problems sometimes, but the rest are more or less fine to understand. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| glidefloss Senior Member United States Joined 5969 days ago 138 posts - 154 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 5 of 9 19 March 2015 at 8:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've probably put in about 100 hours listening to Spanish from Spain, and 400 hours listening to this strange type
of dubbed Mexican Spanish. Meanwhile, I live in Mexico and interact (somewhat minimally) with people from Mexico City, Veracruz, and Northern Mexico. My tutor has an accent from the North, and while I can have a conversation with him, he doesn't come through nearly as clearly as the dubbed shows. Basically, I've done something weird, and taught myself a type of Spanish that doesn't exist outside of television. Maybe it's be equivalent to an English learner only listening to the BBC announcers and nothing else. My level is something like "I speak Spanish, but badly" -- basically what I've been told by people. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| holly heels Groupie United States Joined 3887 days ago 47 posts - 107 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 6 of 9 19 March 2015 at 10:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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A global language like Spanish must have a number of Satellite TV networks for the entire Hispanosphere, which would offer news programs with the whole spectrum of native accents.
This is certainly true for Mandarin networks, where in a 22 minute news show you get everything from professorspeak to peasant gobbledeegook. I might add that nearly all Mandarin shows have subtitles, which I don't use, but I would assume that they are used for native Chinese who might speak a rural dialect which doesn't conform to standard Mandarin accent, so maybe even they have trouble with accents, if that's any consolation. I doubt that the subtitles are just for the hearing-impaired or Cantonese monoglots. And I agree target language radio and TV is sometimes boring and I have watched news stories about tainted oysters and broken ferris wheels which are not in and of themselves interesting, but they are necessary for the 1000s of input hours required for native-level comprehension. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4669 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 7 of 9 19 March 2015 at 10:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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The Mexican TV accent (used in dubbed movies, soap operas) is only mildly Mexican,
the full name of this variety is ''Neutral Latin American Spanish'' and it's the same you hear on Telemundo and on CNN [Latin} news. In real-life informal situations, this accent is more likely to be heard in Colombia and Peru than in Mexico, because in Mexico: '' A striking feature of Mexican Spanish, particularly in that of central Mexico, is the high rate of unstressed vowel reduction and elision, as in /ˈtɾasts/ (trastos, 'cooking utensils'). This process is most frequent when a vowel is in contact with the sound /s/, so that /s/+ vowel + /s/ is the construction when the vowel is most frequently affected.[7][8][9] It can be the case that the words pesos, pesas, and peces are pronounced the same /ˈpesəs/. The vowels are slightly less frequently reduced or eliminated in the constructions /t, p, k, d/ + vowel + /s/, so that the words pastas, pastes, and pastos may also be pronounced the same /ˈpasts/.'' {Wikipedia} Edited by Medulin on 19 March 2015 at 10:46pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5010 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 8 of 9 19 March 2015 at 10:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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I totally agree: focus at learning Spanish in general and consider learning to
understand various accents a long-term task with no deadline. It will get better and better. However, I disagree with holly heels about all the native accents being available in a form useful to a learner who isn't present in the area. For exemple, the south of Spain, mostly Andalusia, is a region with huge accent (and there are more differences than just the accent. The pronunciation is different, and I think there are even some grammar usage differences) even among theyoung and well educated people. Not only a learner can have huge troubles understanding, even the natives from the north of Spain may be having harder time with them. Sure, they are better at understanding the accent than an intermediate learner but, obviously, they aren't used to the accent from the media either and they live in the same country. So, standard Spanish (either European or Latin American version) will open your way to lots of speakers, I guess even majority. And you are likely to quickly develop comprehension of the accents only a little different from the major ones. However, I'm afraid that we'll both need to wait a long time to get to know properly accents not covered in media and without wider access to the natives. And I believe we are quite unlikely to cover all the Spanish accents in a lifetime. By the way, if anyone knows movies or tv series in Andalusian Spanish, I would really appreciate your advice on what to look for. I plan to travel to the area and not being able to prepare myself is a bit disheartening 1 person has voted this message useful |
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