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Timeline to developing an accent | ||
Tags: Accent | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5378 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes  Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 41 of 100 26 March 2014 at 2:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
To comment on both Ari's and SC's points -- I would agree that the vast majority of people with "a negligeable accent" probably did well from the beginning and started out with a good accent. However, I don't think there's much to extrapolate from that. It simply means that people with a less than stellar accent never worked on it significantly, or don't know how to -- not that they can't fix it. People with a thick accent suddenly acquiring a good accent are also rare -- again, because it's fairly rare for people to set out to fix such an issue. Qualified help is also hard to find. In short, we can only say two things for sure: 1) some people are more apt at picking the right sounds from the beginning and 2) the rest rarely set out to fix their accents after years of learning. This doesn't tell us much about what degree of improvement is possible for a mature learner with the right tools and determination. As for the question of fixing a "set" accent, I'm not convinced that older habits left unattended for years are harder to fix than more recent ones that a student would be setting in the first few months of their studying the language. My premise being that if any accent is, by and large, the result of L1 interference, than a bad habit is usually a pattern that was never noticed, understood or controlled. Learning about the issue and setting out to create a change and forming a new habit is not an easy task, but I suspect it would only minimally be affected by how long the previous habit existed. Note that I am only referring to habits concerning the production of given sounds -- if a person spent 20 years pronouncing most words wrong because their representation of the words includes the wrong sounds, then this person is indeed at a disadvantage in comparison to a new student who is suddenly in a position to acquire new words with the right sounds. But this is a different problem. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4662 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 42 of 100 26 March 2014 at 2:37pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've been told I have a pretty good accent in Spanish but I'm not sure how much of this to attribute to "talent" and how much to conscious attention. Certain things had always seemed clear to me about the language (the "purity" of the vowels compared to American English, the fact that L, T, P sounded different than in English, the fact that the intonation was very different) and I consciously tried to incorporate them even in my decidedly mediocre high school class, but others had not (the changes in B/V, D, G when they are intervocalic, the fact that B and V are exactly the same sound, that R was supposed to be trilled after certain consonants) until they were pointed out to me. It seems like people could at least learn to hear such things after a little practice; whether they actually choose to try and "assimilate" them into their speaking is another question, I guess. I think many people just sort of give up on certain things after a while (for example, the RR in the particular case of Spanish). Edited by tastyonions on 26 March 2014 at 2:43pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| SamD Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6656 days ago 823 posts - 987 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 43 of 100 27 March 2014 at 5:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Developing a native accent isn't one of my first priorities when I learn a language. I am more concerned with getting the pronunciation right, particularly in the earlier stages.
How long does it take to develop a "good" or "native" accent in a foreign language? That will depend on your native language, your age, your target language, the quality of the target language input, how much time you put into the project and your ear for accents. My definition of a "good" accent is one that doesn't keep native listeners from understanding you. It doesn't reduce them to fits of giggling. If you grow up with grandparents or other relatives who speak your target language--and you hear them speak it--it may be very easy for you to develop a good accent or even a near-native one very quickly. I think of the children of immigrants developing these accents so quickly in their parents' languages. The rest of us may well need a few years to sound really good in a foreign language. When I was in high school, I heard plenty of people in fourth-year French and third-year Spanish who did not have good accents. I was told I had a "good" accent, but I don't know how meaningful such praise was. When I started taking college French courses and hearing more "real" French, my accent improved. After graduation, I went to Europe. French people understood me most of the time and I usually understood them. Nobody thought I was French, and people seemed a bit surprised that I was American; they assumed I was German. When they found out I was American, they said my English was "good for an American." I have known people who immigrated to my home town here and have lived here for decades. They have married Americans, raised children who speak with a local accent, and live overwhelmingly English-speaking lives. However, they always sound a little different from native speakers of English. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6579 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 44 of 100 27 March 2014 at 6:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
You say this like it's the exception. It's the norm. Using a language doesn't improve one's accent. Unless you consciously work on reducing your accent, with excercises and probably a speaking coach, you accent will not change no matter how long you keep using the language. 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Darya0Khoshki Triglot Groupie United States Joined 5065 days ago 71 posts - 91 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), Arabic (Iraqi) Studies: Persian | Message 45 of 100 28 March 2014 at 3:52am | IP Logged | |||||
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I agree that one's accent does not change much.
While exceedingly rare, I have actually met 2 or 3 Arabs who never left their own country and spoke English without an accent. They sounded American to me; in one case, I could never tell that he was not American, in the other two, I could barely tell sometimes. I've known other immigrants who came to the US at age 20 or so and still have a slight but noticeable accent after 30 years. It's baffling to me what the difference is! I feel I have pretty good pronunciation (but not perfect) across my languages regardless of how much and how long I have been speaking them. I get complimented on my accent or told I don't have one (I wish! but I don't believe this) or mistaken for a native speaker (but not by all the time) ... and while I probably have more pronunciation issues in Farsi than Arabic due to less exposure to the language and less practice, I still feel like I have a decent accent in both and the amount of time I've spent on them or how old I was when I started learning hasn't made a huge difference. Sometimes people think I know more than I do (say in Kurdish, which I speak with good pronunciation but have a limited vocab and poor grammar) because I can imitate the sound of it, but that doesn't mean I can really speak it. ;-) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5204 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 46 of 100 28 March 2014 at 11:08am | IP Logged | |||||
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I think Ari hit the nail on the head. There seems to be a common idea that accent is something that improves naturally as you hear and use the language more, which for most people just isn't the case.
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| Retinend Triglot Senior Member SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4305 days ago 283 posts - 557 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), French | Message 47 of 100 28 March 2014 at 9:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
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To nitpick - there's surely some range of natural progression that comes with just
listening to and interacting with others in the language, but I agree that this probably doesn't go too far unless you thereafter take active steps to listen attentively and compare your speech to natives. I hope that my shadowing from the start will have good long-term effects on my Spanish accent - with shadowing you are always reinforced by a good model, and through not speaking without "training wheels," I'm not giving myself dangerous freedom to invent my own idea of what a Spanish accent is. My German accent, acquired in the same way, has not been proved yet. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4704 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 48 of 100 28 March 2014 at 9:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
Shadowing is useful for a lot of things, but accent improvement is not one of them. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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