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Accents and Colours | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5668 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes  Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 1 of 16 02 November 2014 at 11:00am | IP Logged | ||
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I have a friend who speaks several languages, and all of them with accents that native speakers have told me are exceptionally good. I asked her "how do you do it?" and she said "I just speak the same way the native speakers do". Well, that didn't help much.
I was reminded of this when I met her again and we were talking about a newly painted building, that I said was "blue and white". She asked me if I were being serious, since the building was clearly "periwinkle and eggshell". At first I thought she was joking, but she assured me that she sees all kinds of different colors, and can distinguish different blues as easily as I distinguish red from greed, for example. Again, I asked "how do you do this?" and she said "when I have seen a colour before, I remember it." This took my mind back to her effortless ability with accents. Just as I cannot easily distinguish different shades of colours on sight, I believe that I cannot notice effortlessly small (heck, even large) differences between how a native speakers pronounces something, and the way I pronounce it. That is, I believe that much of my "accent" deficiency is not a problem of speaking but a problem of hearing. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5235 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 2 of 16 02 November 2014 at 11:13am | IP Logged | ||
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I doubt that, my neighbour speaks 3 languages and she has been deaf in one ear since birth and has only 50% hearing in the other ear. I suspect it is more of an "attention" problem. She pays attention to the detail of colours and accents, while you probably don't focus on that as much.
But I could be wrong. This colour difference chart might explain something? Edited by rdearman on 02 November 2014 at 11:24am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5668 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 3 of 16 02 November 2014 at 11:36am | IP Logged | ||
Hahaha - that colour chart is fantastic. Thank you. It explains a lot. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4532 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 4 of 16 02 November 2014 at 1:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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Interestingly there could be a genetic reason for women having more color names. There are three major types of receptors in the retina for colour (the so called L(ong), M(edium), and S(hort) wavelength cones).
The brain (very simply) adds and subtracts the relative amount of activity of the three types of cones to produce the different color perspectives: L + M > S == Yellow L + M < S == Blue L > M == Red L < M == Green I.e,. When there is more activity in the L and M cones compared to the S cones you see yellow, etc. And this is why "normal" sighted people only perceive four pure colors. Interestingly the genetics of the cones are carried on the X-chromosome. There are actually common variations in L cones, and say half of all cones are of the L1 type and half of the L2. L1 and L2 differ a little from each other in the wavelengths they pickup (much less though than L vs M). Things get interesting when you consider that only one X-chromosome is ever active in a cell. This means that for approximately half of women the retina can be composed for a random assortment of cones of which half are L1 and half L2 (men always have ONLY one cone class (L1 or L2) as they only have one X-chromosome - and approximately half of women also only have one L class type on the retina, as the inherit the same L-class type from both their father and mother). What that means is that some women have a finer grained color space than men, and can be considered true tetrachromats; not trichromats like all men, and half of all women. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy Are you a tetrachromat? https://research.ncl.ac.uk/tetrachromacy/faqs/ Edited by patrickwilken on 02 November 2014 at 2:17pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4706 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 5 of 16 02 November 2014 at 2:02pm | IP Logged | ||
Often I find that the problem with distinguishing accents is an ability to hear the specific phonemes that make up the certain chart of a sound in a certain language. To other people, for whom all these sounds are allophonic, they cannot tell the difference between them and thus they don't pronounce them any differently. A true revelation for me happened when I learned to produce the alveolar tap and trill. I had never been able to and when I was 22 I embarked on learning Russian where this sound is pretty crucial. Suddenly, I started noticing alveolar taps and trills in Dutch where they had never before appeared to me. I had always registered uvular and alveolar taps as the same sound in my brain, and only learning to pronounce the sounds separately and training myself to listen for the difference taught me that there is a difference between all of those sounds, and has enabled me to pronounce Russian much better than before. The same thing is now going on with soft and hard sounds in Russian (an important distinction not made in Dutch). I can now hear the difference between the different variants, although producing it is still a chore (and knowing where to put the stress when you don't know the word is double the chore). Learning to notice these differents in sound and accent is something that takes a lot of time and effort to get right, but it's a reason why it's becoming easier for me to speak with relatively less of an accent than most people, even though my grammar would be comparable to theirs. This is, by the way, the sort of thing a speech therapist helps with and which is why I find it useful to act as if I were going to a speech therapist when learning a new language and more importantly its new sounds. The second thing that comes on top of that is noticing intonation phenomena and there's just not enough information on that. Edited by tarvos on 02 November 2014 at 2:04pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6596 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 6 of 16 02 November 2014 at 11:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think there are several requirements for speaking in a native-like way, such as hearing the sounds, hearing the intonation, knowing what to do with your mouth (and being able to do it), not feeling awkward or embarrassed (or not letting these feelings affect you), making it automatic/making it easier to pronounce correctly than incorrectly. It also helps if you get the feedback (including subconscious) that you are easier to understand with a more native-like accent, and liking the sound of the language can help as well, but these are less essential, I think.
Most of us are good at something I listed, likely even to the point of doing it intuitively without thinking. But pretty much everyone needs to work on some key aspects consciously, so acquiring a native-like pronunciation as an adult is a whole chain reaction. It's like those unrealistic sequences in movies when plenty of things need to go right and somehow they do. It does happen for some people, even those not considering themselves talented, but overall it's rare. As for the colour chart, I wonder if it looks exaggerated to native speakers, especially women? I think they included some obscure ones deliberately, but then again I know pretty much all of these passively. I just tend to think of many as comparisons rather than actual names for colours. They're not set in stone and quite a few are interchangeable. But maybe I'm just processing the colours like in Russian, where many non-transparent names are fairly technical? My mum is a painter but even she doesn't use all the fine shades in ordinary life, unless it's important to make a distinction. Edited by Serpent on 02 November 2014 at 11:22pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5380 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 7 of 16 04 November 2014 at 4:37pm | IP Logged | ||
A problem of perception, perhaps, but not of hearing: I think I do ok with accents, yet I was always hard-of-hearing. Now whether this is an innate ability or if this perception can be improved upon is a difficult issue to solve. If pressed, I'd venture that anything can be learned, but that doesn't mean it's easy. I'd also suggest that playing with "phonetic colours" can be done in one's first language, and that these skills would then transfer to other languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4664 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 8 of 16 11 November 2014 at 7:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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I am pretty useless with colors but pretty good with accents.
I have, though, always liked making different sounds with my mouth. It's kind of a habit, to the point that it sometimes bugs my wife. Maybe that has helped me. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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