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I fooled a native speaker | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Cultural Experiences in Foreign Languages |  | |
| Siberiano Tetraglot Senior Member Russian Federation one-giant-leap.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6502 days ago 465 posts - 696 votes  Speaks: Russian*, English, ItalianC1, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Serbian | Message 17 of 56 05 May 2007 at 1:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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Today I had this brilliant moment of joy. An American guy has beleived I'm British.
Here, in my Uni, there has been a festival of international relationships. Today was the last but one day of the fest, and the main event was "Street of Countries". It looked just like a year ago on my photo. Several kiosks with entertainment and competitions related to different countries. A great event itself! So, me and my friend Anton who has been to Britain, came to the US kiosk. There was an American guy, Antony, fron NJ. We made a joke on that their kiosk wasn't prepared good enough. Antony said the typical British joke on Americans: show us what you invented yourself. Antony looking at Anton's T-shirt (with "Cambridge" title) says: So you're those guys from Cambridge? We nodded, but not very expressively, like nodding only by 1/2. Then we continued talk, learned who studied what. Me and Antony, the American, appeared to be both economists having similar interests. We discussed it for several minutes, then I tried to play their competition - guess the state on a map of US by its 2-letter code. In conclusion I said "I know all of them, but can't remember right now, and these abbreviations are too hard to decipher." An hour or two later, I joined him discussing something in English with other Russian guys. He said like "in the US this is done this way, and in the UK..." and indicated at me with his palm, and then asked me about something that deals with Britain. So, I hope, I spoke well enough at the first meeting. :) Edited by Siberiano on 06 May 2007 at 12:43pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| johntothea Senior Member United States Joined 6637 days ago 193 posts - 192 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Russian, Norwegian, Polish, French | Message 18 of 56 05 May 2007 at 4:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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Not trying to offend but in your last sentence good should be well. Don't worry though, 99.9% of native english speakers do this all the time, even my english teacher.
And congratulations! That's an achievment that I hope to have one day in one of my target languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Vlad Trilingual Super Polyglot Senior Member Czechoslovakia foreverastudent.com Joined 6593 days ago 443 posts - 576 votes 2 sounds Speaks: Czech*, Slovak*, Hungarian*, Mandarin, EnglishC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Serbian, French Studies: Persian, Taiwanese, Romanian, Portuguese | Message 19 of 56 17 May 2007 at 8:28am | IP Logged | ||
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I had a funny moment the other day, when I was flying from Russia to Prague and then subsequently to my hometown.
At the Prague airport, I was talking Russian on the phone with my friend, just discussing something that I needed to do for him when I get home. The call took me about 5 minutes. I was sitting next to a man, who later sat next to me in the plane to my hometown. We later talked and I found out, that he was a Slovak businessman living half of his life in Russia and half in Slovakia, so his Russian was close to native. He actually had a slight Russian accent in Slovak. Anyways this is not so important. As we sat down in the plane, I pulled out a Russian book to pass the long time and as I was hungry I wanted to know, whether they were going to serve food on the flight, so I ask the man - the same man I was sitting next to at the airport, the businessman - I ask him: do you speak English or Slovak? His response was: Slovak, but English is ok too. So I ask in Slovak, which is my native language: Do you think that they are going to serve food on this flight? (Neviete nahodou, ci sa pocas letu bude podavat nejake jedlo?) and he said that he certainly hoped so. And after that he said, that given the fact, that I'm Russian, I learned the Slovak language pretty well:-) So we had a nice laugh when I said that I was Slovak and went to Russia to study the language. I know for sure, that if he had talked to me for some time in Russian, he would change his mind, but still it was a funny moment. I made a Slovak person believe I was Russian, when I spoke Slovak to him..now I don't know if it is good or bad:-) I think fooling a native speaker is very possible in the USA, where people are used to different accents. There, it happened to me very often. Actually, people usually didn’t ask, where I was from, because they assumed I was American. Once I talked to a Spanish man in the store in New York where I used to work in Spanish. He was from Venezuela. We were talking about common things for about 5-10 minutes when I asked where he was from. He then asked me, and you? Costa Rica? That felt very nice. When I usually speak Spanish my friends tell me, that my accent sounds like a mix of Italian and Dominican, but not Eastern European... who knows. In Hungary I have these most ridiculous moments. My Hungarian is getting more and more rusty and here in Slovakia some words are different and so on, but since it is my native language, even though it's rusty, the accent is close to perfect (I hope!). So, when I walk into a store in Budapest for some reason I love to talk to the sales people. We talk and talk, everything is good, and since I don't use Hungarian on a daily basis anymore, these random words tend to fall out, sometimes very simple ones. And so then the looks in their eyes, when I ask them how to say "button-up shirt" or simple things like that is just great. Then I explain that I'm not Hungarian and everything is good. With Italian, I had only one experience as passing for a native. It's somewhat difficult, when I'm not quite the latino-type:-) I was on a train from Firenze to Bologna. It was dark already (that helped!) and the train was packed. I started to talk to a nice family next to me and we were talking for maybe 15 minutes. Then I asked them where they were from and they asked me in return, so, you are from Puglia? Which is a region in south Italy. As far as my last and once very strong langue goes - German - I don't really remember anything special. I know that once, when I was working in a hotel in South France, there were some German guests and when we started talking the woman kept repeating to her husband: Er spricht ganz ohne Akzent/ he speaks totally without an accent. Now, I'd probably have a problem achieving that result, because I literally lost contact with the German language, but a week in Duesseldorf would do the trick. I remember one more moment in New York in our store, where there was a Dutch couple coming in and I started talking to them and tried out my super poor Dutch, which is like really a Joke, but I tried as hard as could with my accent and the man said.. oh.. So you're Dutch too? There was noise in the store and a lot of people and so on and I didn't really say that much, I think many people could do the same thing, but it still felt nice. My friend in St.Petersburg heard me talk in all the languages I know and she said, that I speak without an accent in every one of them. She is from Great Britain and speaks perfect Greek too. The trick is, that she studied it in Greece. Her friend from Cyprus says, that she has no accent at all and her friend from Greece says, that he can hear her foreign accent. So my point is, that it's easy to make people think, that you speak without any accent, when you talk fluently and try as hard as you can, when their knowledge of the language is lower than yours. Although she said that my English and Russian were native and the couple of sentences I learned in Greek were without an accent swell. Who knows. It's for others to judge not me. Edited by Vlad on 18 May 2007 at 1:53am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| virgule Senior Member Antarctica Joined 6849 days ago 242 posts - 261 votes Studies: Korean | Message 20 of 56 17 May 2007 at 10:39am | IP Logged | ||
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Just wanted to add to this thread that sometimes people are just polite...
[comment: see post below] Edited by virgule on 20 May 2007 at 5:16am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Alec Newbie United Kingdom Joined 6408 days ago 36 posts - 41 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, Japanese | Message 21 of 56 19 May 2007 at 11:09am | IP Logged | ||
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How very cynical and patronising of you virgule. I think the people who've posted, who've studied many languages and travelled extensively, know the difference between someone being polite and someone genuinely thinking they're a native.
As for my experiences, well on my first trip to Italy after learning Italian for about a year, a woman at a cafe thought I was Spanish. Well, it's not Italian, but considering how similar the languages are, it was a great compliment for me when Englishmen are reputed to speak foreign languages so poorly! She also called me 'bello' but I think every middle-aged woman calls every boy 'bello', hehe. No experiences in Japan that I can recall but I haven't spoken on the phone to Japanese strangers before. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| virgule Senior Member Antarctica Joined 6849 days ago 242 posts - 261 votes Studies: Korean | Message 22 of 56 20 May 2007 at 5:31am | IP Logged | ||
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Sorry, I didn't mean to doubt any of the great achievements in this thread. What I wanted to add is that there are many people out there who will praise you for your language abilities, and not be quite honest. They will tell you only have a very slight accents when in fact they find it hard to understand you; they will tell you how native-like your expressions are etc. The problem is that we shouldn't take all this praise at face value, but understand that often these are expressions of gratitude to the learner making an effort, amazement from people who never took the time to learn languages in detail or really tried to understand foreign cultures.
Call me a cynic, but many contributions here are explicitly about compliments: learners being complimented about their language abilities. I notice that I get confused as a native not when people tell me, but when in the middle of conversation something comes up, where my non-native status is highlighted (e.g. the fact that I can't vote here). It's not in the words I hear, but the reactions I get from my conversation partners; something very hard to describe. So my point was that it's very hard for us to really know what others really think... whether they really took us for native speakers. I personally wouldn't take single events that serious (although surely they can be great motivators). 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Marc Frisch Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6674 days ago 1001 posts - 1169 votes Speaks: German*, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Persian, Tamil | Message 23 of 56 20 May 2007 at 6:29am | IP Logged | ||
Yes, I do it all the time! When someone speaks very good German or French, I'll make compliments and tell them that they don't have an accent and that I'm really impressed. But usually it's not true that I don't hear an accent, but I know that it can be very discouraging to be told that one has an accent, so I don't do that. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Vlad Trilingual Super Polyglot Senior Member Czechoslovakia foreverastudent.com Joined 6593 days ago 443 posts - 576 votes 2 sounds Speaks: Czech*, Slovak*, Hungarian*, Mandarin, EnglishC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Serbian, French Studies: Persian, Taiwanese, Romanian, Portuguese | Message 24 of 56 20 May 2007 at 7:44am | IP Logged | ||
I don't know whether your post was a direct reaction to mine or not. If it was a direct reaction, I don't need to defend myself. I specifically mentioned only those instances, where it was obvious, that the person I was talking to has either mistaken me for a native speaker or was just giving sincere compliments. I do not live off these compliments nor learn languages to receive them. At first I didn't even want to post to this thread to avoid exactly these types of reactions.. the only reason was to share my experience. Edited by Vlad on 20 May 2007 at 7:45am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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