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Can adult learners achieve native levels? | ||
Tags: Native Fluency | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4669 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes  Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 177 of 303 15 October 2012 at 4:55am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Don't let yourself or non-native speakers evaluate your nativeness/native-sounding in a foreign language.
There are many subtle factors than we non-native speakers can't hear when we speak a foreign language. For example, German sch and Croatian š are, in theory the same sound, but acoustically and articulatorily they are not. The German sch is much harder, with slight retroflexivization (as if it were moving toward ʂ ). Yet, the same symbol is used for German sch, English sh and Croatian š. If you want to listen to Croatian as pronounced by a German from Aschaffenburg who represented Croatia on Eurovision Song contest last year (Her mother is from Croatia, so she has dual citizenship), ich Laut and ach Laut, as well as the aspiration of word-initial P F T can be heard, as well as strong sch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxu9Mk-LBdM Edited by Medulin on 15 October 2012 at 4:58am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| petteri Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4933 days ago 117 posts - 208 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: German, Spanish | Message 178 of 303 15 October 2012 at 12:06pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
The chance to simply evaluate native pronunciation relies heavily on the language. For small and pretty uniform languages having pretty limited geographical coverage, like Serbo-Croatian or Finnish, it is much easier to find out whether the speaker is native or not. In the case of world-wide, diverse and geographically scattered languages, like English, it is much harder to judge whether the speaker is a non-native or just has an outlandish accent. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 179 of 303 15 October 2012 at 12:46pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I'm fairly sure that I could learn a lot from a knowledgeable teacher if he/she was 'used' the right way, namely as a constant ressource for instant confirmation or rejection of my own hypotheses - i.e. as part of an instant feedback utility. But I doubt that a decent selfrespecting human teacher would accept those terms, and having co-students to share the teacher would be problematic - and a pure disaster beyond 4-5 or so. So even though I see the idea behind the idea of a benevolent teacher in a class room setting I can't see myself investing in such a fatamorgana. Maybe a machine could do the job without trying to take control - but not now, maybe in ten or twenty years. I would actually prefer a machine if it just evaluated my output and gave short responses, maybe with extra leads which I could follow or not without the risk of offending the teacher.
I have noticed that some members here have expressed grave doubts about their ability to hear differences. For me this is not the main problem - I can hear lots af sounds which don't occur in the languages I already know. There may be distinctions I didn't knew were important (then somebody tell me, please!), but the main problem is forming a stable synthesis of all the things I hear - and that's why I need to study different pronunciations at the phonetic (not phonemic) level. Only if I know which sounds native speakers actually emit when they speak is there any hope that I can learn to say things in the same way. But first I have to form a synthesis of the sounds I hear and consciously select which ones I want to adapt, and it is worth stressing that the simplified phonemic representations don't contain the necessary information.
This is interesting stuff. I first noticed that Okhjum first listens, later listens and 'chorus' (profArguelles would probably have used the word shadowing here) until first his brain, later his brain PLUS his speech organs become saturated. In contrast, I personally need to pin out what I hear, else it will just pass through my brain leaving few traces. So when the circumstances are favorable I break down some spoken example in tiny small bits (probably even shorter than those used by Okhjum) and listen to them - maybe fewer times than Okhjum, but I compensate by writing down what I hear. And because this is a labour and time consuming activity you won't proceed fast, so I'm thrilled to see Okhjum's estimate about 5-10 minutes of recorded material for a complete course in native-like pronunciation. That amount of speech will take at least an hour to process. Whether one session is enough is another question. But getting the details right is not enough. There is definitely also such a thing as extensive listening - in fact I do that for many hours daily when I watch foreign TV or listen to foreign podcasts and videos,and that's how you get stamina and 'zen' - but I get my hardcore knowledge about the possible range of sounds from intensive studies of genuine speech samples. The problem is that I have done too little of that, and I haven't followed it up with enough actual speaking to train my articulatory musculature. Edited by Iversen on 15 October 2012 at 1:05pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Hiiro Yui Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4718 days ago 111 posts - 126 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese | Message 180 of 303 15 October 2012 at 12:57pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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okjhum, thanks so much for your input. I feel a lot better and I’ll be more careful about those double consonants. Here’s that video of Thane Camus (セイン・カミュ) again:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9qCRpvUIrI I’m up for the experiment Arekkusu suggested. I’ve always contended that I’m capable of changing my pronunciation habits by consciously concentrating on it for a few days, and then letting muscle memory take over. Medulin, indeed having natives evaluate pronunciation/accent would be ideal, but Japanese people don’t visit this site. When I ask Japanese guys on Skype, they say I sound good but they don’t know why I don’t sound perfect. They say I’m a little off, but they can’t tell me in what way. Maybe it’s because they are not phonetics experts, I don’t know. You said there are subtleties non-natives can’t hear, but don’t you think it’s possible for a foreigner to attain native accent (even if it’s rare)? In the case of foreign phonetics experts, shouldn’t they technically be able to hear those differences too? petteri, I don’t think anyone is confused about the issue you brought up. I’m aiming for a particular accent of Japanese and I usually ask natives of that variety to evaluate me. Edited by Hiiro Yui on 16 October 2012 at 3:42am 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 181 of 303 15 October 2012 at 3:25pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I second this. I think interaction and natural feedback is crucial in narrowing down the exact range of possible sounds. I love the idea of playing cards to learn a language, by the way ;)
This is not an attack on the exercise suggested here, but I personally prefer to do this with a variety of ongoing sources (ie. not chopped up and prepared). If you choose a weather report, you'll be quite limited in the types of language and intonation you are expoxsed to. Similarly, cutting down audio into "breath groups" removes any context to the native's choice of process: did he go up at the end in this particular way because he was going to introduce two more ideas, was he being comical, ironic, was he unsure, etc.
This is part of why I hesitate to agree: copying (or shadowing) a given phrase, no matter how perfectly, tends to never flow back into a person's natural speech. What needs to be fostered is the ability to predict how a native could react, phonotactically, to any given context, and that's why I favour a more generalized approach where the learner is exposed to a variety of contexts and the speakers use a wide array of expressivity -- only then can the learner gain a general sense of the processes that are available to him. Obviously, this is a lot more efficient when the learner in actually interacting with native speakers in relaxed situations he is also part of.
While 5-10 minutes of recording may contain the vast majority -- if not all -- of the language's possible phonetic interactions, it will only present one person's way to express themselves in a given context. Of course, you could mix various speakers taken from various contexts, but then you narrow down the range you hear from each speaker significantly. Again, my point is that I believe learners need to take in the whole range of sounds and expression from a variety of speakers, not just a subset of one speaker's speech. In the absence of interaction with a native speaker, when there is no one in front of you to send back properly enunciated versions of what you just uttered, the next best thing is exposure to a variety of native pronunciations and I believe that this can present the learner, insofar as he can develop the ability to listen for sounds as well as meaning, all the tools he needs to determine on his own where the limits of native pronunciation lie.
Do you mean that this is how it works for you only or for your students? Edited by Arekkusu on 15 October 2012 at 5:11pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 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 182 of 303 16 October 2012 at 3:49pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
On the other hand, VERY few Finnish learners have a perfect grammar, let alone before developing fluency (I sort of did:) at least in terms of morphology, which is the biggest giveaway). However, if you have a good pronunciation your chances of being taken for a native initially are better than in English... I routinely go through small exchanges without the person realizing I'm not Finnish, but I can't imagine this happening in an English-speaking country. On the other hand this has also happened in Poland. I'm not 100% sure but I'd think this is also possible in Serbo-Croatian - especially for native speakers of other Slavic languages it shouldn't be so hard to pass for speakers of a different dialect (obviously, only if they are willing to drop the phonetics of their native language - which is difficult but very rewarding). Speaking of that... is "fitting in" an important concept for anyone else? I speak quite little even in my native language, and I simply can't imagine having a 5-min conversation without introducing myself and saying where I'm from. However, I really love the sense of just fitting in, being among native speakers without them realizing I'm not one of them. It's actually a level of fluency for me, and in this sense I'm fluent in Finnish and Polish. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4669 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 183 of 303 17 October 2012 at 12:11am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
They THINK they speak like natives, but they don't. Germans, even many advanced learners/fluents speakers pronounce LOG IN like LOCK IN ;) Read here: ''The subjects were not completely unable to make use of the acoustic cues that distinguish /s/ and /z/. In fact, the Norwegian subjects appear able to make more use of vowel and consonant duration in perception of the /s/―/z/ contrast than in production. The language learning models we have referenced do not appear to distinguish the «act» of production from the «act» of perception. They are overall considered two aspects of the same cognitive process, i.e. an implementation of a «phonetic category», but the Norwegian subjects do not implement the acoustic features in the /s/―/z/ contrast the same for production and perception. This indicates that perception and production is not a realization of a category as a whole, but as integration of cues. To conclude our study, we have found evidence to suggest that native speakers of Norwegian do not have a very good mastery of the /s/―/z/ contrast, despite being intimately familiar with the acoustic parameters the contrast utilizes. '' source: Norwegians’ production and perception of the voiceless–voiced contrast in English Aleksander Morland http://www.ntnu.no/c/document_library/get_file?uuid=a6651860 -fcb4-4347-9dc0-20a5080e2805&groupId=10262 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| okjhum Pentaglot Groupie Sweden olle-kjellin.com Joined 5205 days ago 40 posts - 190 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Japanese, English, German, Russian Studies: Spanish, Polish, Greek | Message 184 of 303 17 October 2012 at 10:13am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
IMHO, the segmental distinctions (vowels, consonants) are very important, but only after the suprasegmental features (rhythm, intonation) have been properly tended to; or together with them. They go rather hand-in-hand. But if we neglect the suprasegmentals, even "perfect" segmentals are more or less useless. The so-called segmental pronunciation is entirely dependent on the suprasegmental environment. That said, the English vowel length distinction before voiced and voiceless consonants, repectively, is much larger than we foreigners tend to think. The [a] is much, much longer in "bad" than in "bat". The [ai] is much, much longer in "eyes" than in "ice". Swedish people, who also have long-short and voice-voiceless contrasts, tend to think we can do it in the Swedish way when we speak English, but that makes a strong accent. It is true that we don't have the s-z contrast, so many of us Scandinavians miss it out completely. It is comparable with the Japanese problem with r-l, and the Swedish contrasts y-u and tj-sj for foreign learners. In sum, a live teacher is required to point out the small but salient details, segmental or suprasegmental, that are invisible in the writing but are of paramount importance to "make it sound English/Swedish/Japanese..." and help the learners to find them and automatize them. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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