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The importance of a good accent | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4445 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes  Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 249 of 255 02 May 2013 at 8:45am | IP Logged | ||
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Having good accent helps people understand your message in a conversation.
During the Chinese New Year, the French-Canadian singer Celine Dion was invited to perform in China singing the song Molihua (Jasmine flower) on stage. Not knowing a single word in Chinese she imitated the pronunciation quite well. However, when the thank you came from a lady host, one could hardly hear what the host was saying. You assumed she said something to thank the singer for her performance. I've mentioned a few times my experience at the Shanghai airport. If you are a native Chinese speaker you would have no trouble getting the flight arrival & departure info. When the announcement was repeated in English, it was a different story. There was 1 documentaries I've seen from Hong Kong featuring Mainland Chinese students at a HK university campus. Some learned to be fluent in Cantonese although their mother-tongue is Mandarin. I heard 1 student speaking Cantonese with seemingly flawless grammar but still had trouble picking up every word without reading the subtitles because he mispronounce some of the words. Even if your grammar isn't perfect, I'd prefer someone who at least master the accent sufficiently to be understood. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 250 of 255 03 May 2013 at 2:04am | IP Logged | ||
What's left unsaid is that "accent" (read "pronunciation") is especially important to you because of the tones in Sinitic languages. A non-native speaker of English can phonologically befuddle me with stressing syllables in a nonstandard way or doing similarly with certain sounds (especially vowels e.g. my ears once detected from an ESL student "out-key" rather than the intended "alt-key"). However tonal/pitch-contour screw-ups would rarely be a problem in English by virtue of being a non-tonal language. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6440 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 251 of 255 03 May 2013 at 2:27am | IP Logged | ||
Atamagaii also strongly advocates this. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6973 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 252 of 255 03 May 2013 at 3:51am | IP Logged | ||
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To me, this seems like it would be a confusing and futile exercise. I imagine that
most foreign language learners do make at least some effort to speak a language correctly and with the proper accent, and so their accent in your native language might not be a perfect reflection of the sounds and prosody of their native language. By mimicking them, you might end up sounding, for instance, like an American trying to sound like a French person who is trying to sound like an American. Like Solfrid, I learn pronunciation, prosody and accent as part of the process of learning the sounds and words of a foreign language. For me, that "accent" is integral to that language and only that language. It would feel strange to take that "accent" and try to force it on my native language, just as I would feel weird taking foreign language grammar and inserting them into my English in order to learn those foreign grammar points or words. Edited by mike245 on 03 May 2013 at 3:52am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| wber Groupie United States Joined 4302 days ago 45 posts - 77 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Vietnamese, French | Message 253 of 255 04 May 2013 at 8:13am | IP Logged | ||
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As long they are really trying, then I don't mind. To me, I view their effort to have a good accent as a sign of respect to the culture and the people whose language they're learning. I mean if I have a horribly thick accent and then start yelling at you because you don't understand a word of what I'm saying, wouldn't that put you off a little? As long as you can be understood and people don't have give you a really blank stare and go huh? Then I guess you're okay.
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| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4669 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 254 of 255 06 May 2013 at 5:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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''Why Pronunciation Should Be a Priority'':
''At the moment, pronunciation is not a top priority anywhere. On the contrary, a frightening number of colleagues at my own department and other English departments around the country take the view that teaching phonetics and phonology to our students is a waste of time. [ ] Canadian researchers have demonstrated that foreign accents can have communicative consequences as well. In an interesting study from 1995, Munro and Derwing demonstrated that, contrary to general beliefs, the biggest communicative consequence of a foreign accent is not reduced comprehensibility (although that is often one of the costs too), but extra processing time on the part of the listeners. They found that while accented speech may be perfectly comprehensible to native speakers, it generally takes longer to process than unaccented speech. Munro and Derwing interpreted this to mean that the irritation they have often observed in native speakers may well be a result of the extra mental effort that the processing of accented speech requires. [ ] [ ] Moreover, a number of foreign studies have found that a transfer of intonation contours can have very unfortunate consequences for non-native speakers. For example, Gumperz (1982) reported that Indian and Pakistani waiters in a staff cafeteria at a major British airport were perceived as surly and uncooperative by both customers and management. A closer inspection revealed that their intonation contours were the root of the matter. For example, the waiters would annoy the English customers by saying "gravy" with falling intonation when offering gravy, instead of "gravy"? with rising intonation which signals polite uncertainty. The falling intonation pattern was perfectly appropriate for making a polite offer in their own languages. However, to the native English customers, the falling intonation signaled a statement, i.e., "This is gravy", which was a rather rude utterance to make under the circumstances (p. 173). '' http://goo.gl/ps18d Hanne Pernille Andersen, Ph.d-stipendiat, Institut for Engelsk, Germansk og Romansk, Københavns Universitet. Edited by Medulin on 06 May 2013 at 5:59pm 10 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| catullus_roar Quadrilingual Octoglot Groupie Australia Joined 4569 days ago 89 posts - 184 votes Speaks: Malay, Hokkien*, English*, Mandarin*, Cantonese*, French, German, Spanish Studies: Italian, Latin, Armenian, Afrikaans, Russian | Message 255 of 255 07 May 2013 at 3:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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In my opinion, having a good accent is actually really important. I agree with others in that the effort of actually trying is the most important thing but if your accent isn't good native speakers are going to have a really hard time understanding you. And I don't think it's too difficult to get an acceptable accent if you work at it.
I honed my accent through listening to songs and having a very very strict French teacher. However I think the key is to just keep talking to yourself. Even if your accent is clunky or weird at first, repeated practice in the phonemes will soon straighten out any hesitations or strange intotation in your speech. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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