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How to Speak Like a Native | ||
Tags: Non-native Speakers | Accent | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Wulfgar Senior Member United States Joined 4671 days ago 404 posts - 791 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 1 of 63 15 June 2012 at 1:51am | IP Logged | |||||
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How to Speak Like a Native
A friend sent me this article recently. Seems to make sense to me. thoughts? 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Kyrie Senior Member United States clandestein.deviantaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5729 days ago 207 posts - 231 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Portuguese | Message 2 of 63 15 June 2012 at 2:17am | IP Logged | |||||
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I find it quite discouraging to be told that, as an adult, I will never be able to sound
like a native in my target language. But that shouldn't be a surprise: I've never met a foreigner who learned English as an adult and mastered the American accent. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4828 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 3 of 63 15 June 2012 at 2:19am | IP Logged | |||||
Yes, interesting.
In other words, avoid classes? :-) Actually though, although it's true that the presence of a foreign accent doesn't impede intelligibility, the more intrusive the accent sounds, the less acceptable (generally speaking) it will be to the native speaker (listener) of the language in question. So there is probably a law of diminishing returns in operation. No point in striving endlessly for a true "native" accent. It almost certainly isn't going to happen. But this doesn't mean to say you shouldn't try to improve your accent, and try to "fit in" as well as possible. Perhaps correctly used colloquial / informal language plus a large (standard) vocabulary are the main thing. I sometimes find it interesting, in listening to non-native speakers of English, who have been living in England quite a long time, and start to speak in the accent or with the usages of the area they live in. They might not sound exactly like natives, but they definitely "fit in", linguistically speaking. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4622 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 4 of 63 15 June 2012 at 12:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've never believed anyone who says they can speak a foreign language (learned as an adult) "without an accent"
You can speak very clearly and be easily understood but I don't believe you can ever truly imitate native speech patterns and sounds. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| maydayayday Pentaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5219 days ago 564 posts - 839 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, SpanishB2, FrenchB2 Studies: Arabic (Egyptian), Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Polish, Persian, Vietnamese Studies: Urdu | Message 5 of 63 15 June 2012 at 12:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
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There was definitely a [Indian/Pakistani sorry I don't remember which] Doctor working in Wales, on TV in UK this week who spoke English with a Welsh accent.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5532 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 63 15 June 2012 at 3:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've read some scientific papers about adult language acquisition, and I always feel
strangely frustrated by the assumptions behind the research. The experiments generally involve people with near-native English oral skills, and many years of full-time immersion. And the studies typically conclude that: 1. About 95% of adult learners have a faintly-detectable accent, even after multiple decades of immersion. 2. If you give these adults really ugly and awkward English sentences, of the sort that even native speakers need to read twice, the adult learners take a bit longer to answer and perform a bit worse. Now, all this is certainly interesting if you're studying the brain. But if you're learning a foreign language, it seems a bit silly. I mean, many of these subjects are perfectly successful professionals, with C2-level comprehension who speak perfectly natural, colloquial English. Who cares if they have a slight lilt to their accent, or they occasionally misparse an ugly thicket of relative clauses? At some point, it really becomes a game of gotcha: "OK, sure he's a successful trial lawyer, and he can persuade a jury. But if you stick him in a lab, hook him up to a magnetoencephalograph, and ask him horrible grammar questions, you can tell that he's not a native. You know adults can't learn foreign languages, right?" You know, if I spoke eloquent and persuasive French with a faint American accent, I'd be pretty happy. If you needed a magnetoencephalograph to trip me up, I'd be ecstatic. 24 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4701 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 7 of 63 15 June 2012 at 4:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I watched an interesting video about Michel Thomas on Youtube the other day. He stated that the German Gestapo used mathematics as a tool to uncover foreign spies, because sometimes they couldn't detect a foreign accent easily, but mathematics are one of the things you can't possibly achieve true fluency with in any other language than your own.
Well, after 20 years of speaking English (maybe a few more), and no real problems expressing ideas, I can relate to that. I subconsciously use German for mathematical operations, and when I read a text fast, I substitute numbers by their German equivalent. I also find it hard to learn all the numbers and counters in Japanese, my target language. I have to think before saying 今、午後４時１１分だ (Es ist sechzehn Uhr elf, it's 11 minutes past four o'clock in the afternoon). I wouldn't claim I achieved such an undetectable accent in English - but I never actually tried to work on my English pronunciation. I don't even really care about it, as 99,9% of the English I use is in its written form. However, my main goal for Japanese is to actually use it, have lively conversations, orally. I think having a slight accent is fine with me, while sounding like a German unfamiliar with Japanese sounds, reading a text off a paper is not acceptable. I will not, however, accept that it's "impossible to sound like a native", as that's the goal I _have_ to set for myself to get as good as possible. I can agree to the methodology though. You wouldn't want to learn stress or pitch or the pronunciation of specific words in isolation. I've seen posts here on HTLAL promoting this idea (like, for example, Arekkusu's "pitch" postings), but I find it counterproductive. It hinders the process of getting your point across, and as long as you struggle in that department, sounding like a native is the least of my worries. Seriously, things have to be learned in order, and while the basics of pronunciation have to be learned, the finer points have to be trained - and that kind of training comes after reaching a C1/C2 level IMHO. Edited by atama warui on 15 June 2012 at 4:18pm 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5381 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 8 of 63 15 June 2012 at 4:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
This is certainly not true. I would however distinguish between, on the one hand, being able to speak like a native -- and although you won't believe me, I've uttered sentences in several languages and was told it sounded native, including English, Japanese, German -- and, on the other hand, the actual ability to sound native all the time, to the point of fooling someone over a long conversation. In other words, the ability to "truly imitate native speech patterns and sounds" you mention exists for some people, but the ability to do so 100% percent of the time is significantly more difficult and rare. Edited by Arekkusu on 15 June 2012 at 4:21pm 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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