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Can adult learners achieve native levels? | ||
Tags: Native Fluency | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4702 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes  Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 257 of 303 26 October 2012 at 6:19am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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If you really think about it, this thread is really about impatience.
If youreally want to learn a language to perfection, there's nothing to stop you from it. The methods are known, it just takes time and diligence. 3 persons have 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 258 of 303 26 October 2012 at 11:28am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Danish prime minister has a strong Danish accent, merging S, Z and SH, so
she pronounces SUE, ZOO, and SHOE the same ;) She is very fluent tho': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFBrTDosYJY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFBrTDosYJY Josip Juratovic is a Croatian-born deputy in German parliament (Bundestag), he has a strong Bavarian accent (which is actually not bad since most Bavarian politicians in Bundestag have similar accents) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0Meeqcx4VA Edited by Medulin on 26 October 2012 at 11:36am 1 person has 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 259 of 303 26 October 2012 at 12:54pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
No way I would not call Helle's accent strong. In my opinion she clearly has a Scandinavian accent, but her pronunciation is quite moderate and perfectly acceptable by any standards.
It sounds to me like Josip speaks good Southern German with some Slavic flavour. His accent is perfectly acceptable as well. Edited by petteri on 26 October 2012 at 12:59pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4829 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 260 of 303 26 October 2012 at 7:31pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I suppose I have to say "no" to that. :-)
A lot of people seem to think it's possible, although not common. However, I could not go as far as the word "rarely" because that's where you need statistics, and I do not think they exist, and I do not think they actually can exist in a very meaningful form. Various research projects and "lab tests" have been done, and they may have given us some very interesting pointers and even proved or disproved certain aspects of second language acquisition, but I don't know if they can say anything much about language learners in general. They were not (at least the ones I have found) large population studies. Those would be quite difficult and expensive to do.
Well, speaking for myself, I would certainly like to improve and "perfect" my German, but I don't realistically think I could do that without living in Germany/Austria/Switzerland for a longish period, and that is simply not on the cards. So I'd do my best with lots of audio input and speaking practice wherever I can get it, and the kind of exercises Arekkusu and others have described in various posts. (I don't think I'd ever do it in Danish, and "survival level" is enough, at least for the foreseeable future! :-) ). In general, I think it's a good goal to aim for, but also being prepared to be reconciled with a merely "good", and not "perfect" accent. (+intonation, etc, etc). I also still have masses of work to do on vocabulary, idioms, fluency and so on, so pronunciation isn't the only goal, and I think that provided one's pronunciation isn't absolutely hideous and off-putting, then fluency without perfection is a very very acceptable "second prize". I know I'm not the only one who quite enjoys listening to very very fluent and idiomatic speakers of English who retain an unmistakable trace of their original accent, so if I can do the same in another language, that will be OK. But it would be fun to try to go the extra step. And I think if I could actually "hear" my own residual accent when I spoke the TL, then that would be part way. At the moment, I can only do this by deliberately mispronouncing, or being lazy, and very "English". But it's the more subtle things that I can't hear that would be the difficult thing to eliminate. I often think about people like Sacha Distel for example, or Maurice Chevalier, who seemed to have perfectly fluent English, and yet retained their "sexy" French accents, and I wonder: "could they hear their own accent?" and I think in Distel's case, he could, i.e. he "larded it on" for effect, and probably could have sounded a bit more "English" if he'd wanted to, but why would he want to?
Well, you have had some replies to that, and I would add that there are various postings about exercises one can do, applicable to any language. (Must admit, I haven't given them a proper try yet, but I fully intend to). What I would say is that is the conventional world of language learning isn't really all that highly geared up to very self-motivated self-learners. One might say they have self-serving motives - I'll pass on that, but they probably don't really think it's possible to achieve a native like accent, so they don't even think about telling you how to go about it. I've been trying to learn languages now for decades, but it wasn't until I joined HTLAL that I heard the idea that reading a translation (in parallel or not), or listening to an audiobook might be quite useful ...
I applaud your determination, and your respect for the scientific method. I would like to join you, but I suspect with my hearing issues, if I were a "lab rat", I'd probably be eliminated as a candidate, and also because, as I said, I have an inner conviction that a long stay in the TL country is really needed. Because of my hearing issues, I probably can't subject myself to the amount of audio really needed (especially given that it would be mostly via headphones. But apart from that I think we are up against the numbers and resources. This could only be a "lab experiment" and not a population study. You need a reasonable number of subjects and a control group, or at least comparison groups (with different methods. And how do you measure the results? Well, in studies that I've seen you have a panel of native speakers who listen to the subjects doing a variety of test pieces, including spontaneous speech. I suppose there are probably enough native speakers of enough languages here who might be persuaded to take part, but it sounds like an enormously complicated thing to arrange. Edited by montmorency on 26 October 2012 at 7:37pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 261 of 303 26 October 2012 at 9:35pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
There's definitely been a lot of research on the "critical period" hypothesis. Most of this research, sadly, isn't very good. You can find an interesting 15-page overview by Bongaerts, et al., on Google Books. This has a pretty extensive bibliography of other research, and a survey of some important claims. It then goes on to detail a moderately rigorous study. The authors conclude that some people lose the ability to naturally acquire a perfect accent around 6 years old, and most people lose it by puberty. But they managed to find a handful of Dutch students who had mastered the Received Pronunciation accent well enough to outperform some native speakers. Several of these students had really intensive phonetic training and serious professional incentives. 3 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 262 of 303 27 October 2012 at 3:38am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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tarvos, your message was short and vague. Were you criticizing me for misidentifying the type of debate we’re supposed to be having, or do you agree that because people are not arguing scientifically, this thread isn’t going anywhere? I am unique in many ways. Which of them is explained by what you quoted me saying?
petteri, yeah ,there are similar books/ CD’s for Japanese I could buy (although they are aimed at native speakers, so they probably don’t address issues English speakers face). Maybe some of them even have a record feature so I can compare my voice to theirs. I just wish this information were free. It’s kind of like how I know there are speech coaches that provide what I’m asking for, but I don’t want to have to pay for them. I guess I’ll go ahead and buy a course and see where that gets me. I guess the relevant question becomes, “of those who buy such courses, how many reach a native-level accent?” Probably zero, right? Oh, well. Maybe I’ll be the first. Arekkusu, I liked your idea for an experiment. That’s exactly the kind of thinking that’s needed to move this debate forward. Everyone has different hypotheses about the best way to achieve perfection, and now we should test some of them. You think shadowing rarely leads to improved natural speech. okjhum says he has seen results in his students. I say I can incorporate what I shadow (technically I don’t shadow now, but I can start again) into my speech sometimes if I concentrate. You say getting feedback from even non-specialist natives will give me all I need to self-correct. I say I can’t necessarily hear the differences between the way I say things and the way they do, and therefore I don’t know how to adjust myself without being told specifics. Yes, experiments are exactly what we need. I’m willing to try everything and I will, of course, continue to make videos to track my progress. I just wish I weren’t the only one. montmorency, you said you would like to perfect your German, but then started saying that it’s pleasant to listen to people with slight accents. You even questioned why Distel would want to sound more English. If you don’t really want to sound perfect, that’s okay. I understand that it takes a lot more effort than people usually have time/patience for. For those who do want perfection (for whatever reason), there are many ideas about how to do it without moving to the country. Of course, even living in the country for decades doesn’t necessarily improve one’s accent/pronunciation, so if it’s possible without moving or paying for a speech coach, I want to find it. I’m not really thinking of lab experiments. It can be much simpler. It doesn’t necessarily need to meet the rigorous standards you’re imagining. It just needs to meet our needs. An exercise regimen can be designed, and a few people can make sound files or videos of themselves before and after the exercises and post them online. I like the scientific method, not what actual scientists are doing (popularity contests). By the way, what kind of hearing issues do you have? 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 263 of 303 27 October 2012 at 4:20am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I think this post summarizes pretty well what most of us have been saying all along and for years. However you cut and dice the question, regardless of whether you believe in the Critical Period Hypothesis or not, regardless of whether you think attaining a perfect native accent is necessary or not, the simple truth is that very few adult learners achieve it. On the other hand, it seems that a tiny number do. You have a choice. 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 264 of 303 27 October 2012 at 5:38am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
This is where I'd start. Record (for yourself) short exchanges with your tutor where there is a lot of back and forth interactions, such as a discussion or debate with short replies. Listen back together and let him point to you where there were mistakes and look for hints. See if you can get better at spotting the differences. As for experiments, a few weeks back, I suggested an experiment where people would choose a language and eventually a specific passage for me to try to imitate as well as possible over a period of time. The idea being that I would try to document what I did in the process. However, it was perceived -- at least by atama warui -- as a pedantic attempt to self-promote, so I deleted the thread, thinking there was no interest. Edited by Arekkusu on 27 October 2012 at 5:42am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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