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The importance of a good accent | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Aineko Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 5449 days ago 238 posts - 442 votes  Speaks: Serbian*, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin | Message 89 of 255 13 December 2010 at 10:47pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
well, pretty sure. As we concluded earlier, number of advanced language users with foreign accent is way bigger than the perfect accent/bad grammar combination. 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 90 of 255 13 December 2010 at 10:49pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I hear that a lot from people who only speak one language and can't see the use in learning a second one. How can you convince someone that they should care about something when they've already decided it's not worth it? 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 91 of 255 13 December 2010 at 10:51pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Not achieving something is not proof of not caring. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5431 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 92 of 255 13 December 2010 at 11:00pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Please, can we move on? I think the issue has been flogged to death. Maybe we should have a vote. How many people believe that a native-like pronunciation is a necessary goal in learning to speak a foreign language?
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| SamD Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6660 days ago 823 posts - 987 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 93 of 255 13 December 2010 at 11:15pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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My priority is to be able to communicate with natives. I want to speak my target language effectively enough that the natives aren't distracted by a slight or reasonable accent. If I want a native accent, I'm going to need lots of native input and feedback I can't get right now.
French people say that I don't sound like an American. They have asked me if I come from somewhere else in Europe, sometimes even Belgium or Switzerland. I have a younger brother who is adopted as a baby and was born in South Korea. His native language is English. He studied French in school and his accent is far from native, but he can get around in Montreal with it. As a young adult, he learned Korean and spent a year in Seoul. His Korean appearance and imperfect language skills and accent made him a bit of a curiosity. While he was in Seoul, he consciously cjose to focus on his vocabulary and grammar and let the accent take care of itself. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5335 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 94 of 255 13 December 2010 at 11:27pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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There are two things with the development of this discussion which puzzle me. The first is the notion that getting a good accent is something you need to spend hours and hours on, time which you could have spent on learning vocabulary or grammar instead.
The other is almost a pride in speaking a language with an accent, when lets face it: An accent is a failure to pronounce the words the right way. Now that may sound sexy if you are French. If you are, say Norwegian, a heavy accent make you sound like the Swedish cook on the Muppet show. Not exactly what you dream of. Surely, most of us when we try to learn a language we want to pronounce it as correctly as possible, and we mimick the sounds as well as we can. Personally I am a little parrot, which means that I pick up accents fairly rapidly. That does not mean that I speak with a native like accent, but I do my best to pronounce sounds the way they are supposed to be pronounced. I can't believe we are even discussing whether that makes sense. Why on earth would we deliberately want to pronounce words the wrong way? In Spanish I have an Andalusian accent, because I learned my Spanish there. It would seem a lot more phoney to me to speak it with a Norwegian accent - and I see no point either. If anyone thinks it sounds stupid with an Andalusian accent on a blonde very Norwegian looking girl, then let them. My "English" accent is all over the place - allthough I usually describe it as Mid-Atlantic. If I am relaxed, the accent will be more American, if I spend time with Brits, or if I am livid about something, it will turn more British. And since my kids say I have a funny accent, that probably means that I have some Norwegian accent left in there, but that is definitely not intentional. I would however never, ever under any circumstances not make the effort to try to pronounce things the right way, any more than I would deliberatly mess up the tenses, just to be true to the tenses in my own language. In fact I am so surprized at the turn of the discussion, that I am wondering whether we are actually thinking of different things when we talk about accents. To me to have a heavy accent, is to confuse consonants ("to sink about" in German, "to hafe a car" in Dutch" wrong vowel length ("there is no shit(sheet)on my bed"), to drop the H because it does not exist in your mother tongue. Things that are down right wrong. I am however starting to suspect that when some of you are talking about accent, you refer to a situation where words are generally pronounced the right way, but that perhaps the intonation is a little off, or you use a different R or L- variations which have no bearing on the meaning, and which do not lead to confusion. At least I hope this is the case. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5431 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 95 of 255 13 December 2010 at 11:37pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Solfrid, a voice of reason. Just like you, I'm puzzled by this debate. Does anybody believe that correct pronunciation is not important? Is anybody suggesting that it is good to pronounce words the wrong way? Certainly not here at HTLAL. The debate seems to have gotten caught up in some abstract controversy on the importance of native-like speech. I wonder why are even having this debate.
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| Aineko Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 5449 days ago 238 posts - 442 votes Speaks: Serbian*, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin | Message 96 of 255 13 December 2010 at 11:45pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I asked the same question few pages ago :). 1 person has voted this message useful |
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