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Sarnek’s Log - TAC ’15 (Rätsel, Sleipnir) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Sarnek Diglot Senior Member Italy Joined 4213 days ago 308 posts - 414 votes  Speaks: Italian*, English Studies: German, Swedish | Message 137 of 176 29 April 2015 at 10:24am | IP Logged | |||||
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Here's a thought: I wonder if people would speak a foreign language with a better accent/with
no accent at all if they didn't rely on written resources... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5205 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 138 of 176 29 April 2015 at 10:37am | IP Logged | |||||
Interesting idea. I once read an argument against reading too much as a beginner/intermediate, because as you read you tend to pronounce the words in your head which could reinforce incorrect pronunciation habits. I don't know whether that's true, but it wouldn't surprise me, and it's food for thought. I certainly developed a lot of bad pronunciation from high school French, although it's hard to say whether that was due to too much written material, not enough spoken material, or lack of explicit instruction on sounds and prosody. Most likely a combination of all of these. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4519 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 139 of 176 29 April 2015 at 1:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
It has its own problems. Just an example: When I was in my teenage years, people would talk about "Saufpark". It's not a park to get drunk at, but a tv series. The same people had no problem with the "th" sound in general, but they had never seen the word written down and this was what they heard. If you don't have written sources, you'll need some proper phonetic training before it makes sense to study a language with different phonology than your own, otherwise you'll act like a small child saying eg. "Scheibenwerfer" instead of "Scheinwerfer" (<- ben> is pronounced /bm/ or only /m/), "Nut" instead of "Blut", "Binne" instead of "Spinne" (all real world examples here :) ) just because this is what you think people are saying. Edited by daegga on 29 April 2015 at 1:16pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sarnek Diglot Senior Member Italy Joined 4213 days ago 308 posts - 414 votes Speaks: Italian*, English Studies: German, Swedish | Message 140 of 176 29 April 2015 at 3:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
Could it be perhaps because they Germanised the sounds (for social reasons)? For example in Italy we tend to Italianise every English word, so for example we (me included I must admit) pronounce "Game of thrones" as "gheim of frons", or even "gheim of trons". It's not a pronunciation mistake, it's just that it would sound weird to say it in perfect English. Well I don't know about that. I mean you could obviously make small mistakes at first but then you'll get it eventually. After all, this is how children learn. Edited by Sarnek on 29 April 2015 at 3:56pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Elenia Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom lilyonlife.blog Joined 3854 days ago 239 posts - 327 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Swedish, Esperanto | Message 141 of 176 30 April 2015 at 2:01am | IP Logged | |||||
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I remember reading that accent acquiescence begins in the womb. I'm not sure how true
this is, but I think the problem is losing the ability to hear/reproduce certain sounds. I don't think this loss is irreversible, and it's probably not even very serious for the most part. But I know it took me ages to hear and reproduce the difference between l'amour and la mort, for example, and that's a case where the written word should have probably given me a clue! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sarnek Diglot Senior Member Italy Joined 4213 days ago 308 posts - 414 votes Speaks: Italian*, English Studies: German, Swedish | Message 142 of 176 30 April 2015 at 9:11am | IP Logged | |||||
It could be that the children's ability to acquire new phonemes and produce them naturally somehow stops once they learn their native language(s), but probably not because of how we're built (so that this ability would stop working forever but you can still get a good accent with some proper training in phonetics), but simply because there's no need for such a function any longer, and therefore it atrophies and remains asleep until called upon again (ie. learning a new language). If this is true, it must mean that this ability could be restored with "just" some hard work and patience, and the later in life you do this the harder you must work. Written texts would then only hinder this process or maybe corrupt it altogether, as even if there were a 1 phoneme = 1 symbol correspondence in a language (italian is one the closest in this regard amongst the languages that use the latin script, but even then there are some exceptions) written texts would leave out the prosody and the natural melody of the language, which may change depending on whether it's a statement, a question or a command, the number of stressed/unstressed syllables, the emphasis and other pragramatics reasons. But I wonder to what extent does a training in phonetics help in the process of "reactivating" this lost ability. Edited by Sarnek on 30 April 2015 at 9:16am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4519 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 143 of 176 30 April 2015 at 3:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
It helped me at least to become aware. I'll just stay in my native language because it's easiest for me to explain: Northern Germans have a distinct accent to us southerners, but I used to think they speak just like us (when speaking Standard German), just with a different accent. But in fact, they use a different phonology. So when those northerners would use [z] in a German word, I would hear [s] but I would also hear that the accent is quite different. Nowadays I hear that they actually pronounce it [z] and know that part of the difference in accent is because of this. Vowel quality is another big part by the way. But then, I should've had this ability natively because of TV, and maybe it was just dormant. It's much harder when languages have different discriminative borders between phonemes (think of the difference in voiced/unvoiced in English/French respectively) or even more phonemes in a certain range (eg. Swedish rounded closed vowels vs. /u/ and /y/ in German). Edited by daegga on 30 April 2015 at 3:11pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sarnek Diglot Senior Member Italy Joined 4213 days ago 308 posts - 414 votes Speaks: Italian*, English Studies: German, Swedish | Message 144 of 176 30 April 2015 at 4:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
I also hear the northern s as [s], why do you think it's [z]? Of course maybe you won't recognise all the nuances at first, but you can in fact tell most of the sounds apart. For example, the German close-mid back rounded vowel [o] like in "Hotel" or "Boden" is different from the same sound Italian or swedish have, and even though they had the same name when I first started studying German phonology, I could clearly hear that they were different. Many months later I've discovered it was actually due to the different ways swedish and Italian and German protrude the lips when uttering the sound. Same applies for the swedish [s], which is still described as a voiceless alveolar fricative but you can hear that it's different from its Italian/german counterpart by paying close attention; whether you are able to perfectly produce the sound, that's another matter, and is why I wonder if you need to be trained in order to solve this problem (which I'm quite sceptic about, but at the same I can't find any other solution). 1 person has voted this message useful |
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