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How to Speak Like a Native | ||
Tags: Non-native Speakers | Accent | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4828 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 17 of 63 16 June 2012 at 1:19am | IP Logged | |||||
It's a lovely idea. However, it will break down one day when you meet a TL speaker who has been playing the same game in your native language :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| AdamUK Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5154 days ago 12 posts - 39 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Italian, Spanish | Message 18 of 63 16 June 2012 at 2:16am | IP Logged | |||||
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I disagree with the notion that an adult learner will not be able to replicate an accent. My sisters boyfriend is Austrian, learned English all the way through his school and technical college education and then moved to the UK. He speaks perfectly fluent English with a Yorkshire accent and he has mastered all the idioms and local slang. I think people are far too different in both their goals and the amount of effort they apply. For some, a native accent is not what they are really aiming for, they just want to chat with natives or read literature whilst someone like myself will strive for a perfect accent.
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| jazzboy.bebop Senior Member Norway norwegianthroughnove Joined 5418 days ago 439 posts - 800 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Norwegian | Message 19 of 63 16 June 2012 at 3:17am | IP Logged | |||||
Agreed. I also think the environment and approach to accent formation have a big impact on a person's ability to imitate. The people you spend the most time with greatly influence your accent. In Glasgow for example, we have a fairly large Pakistani community. Within this community there is a particular accent which is somewhat a blending of Glaswegian with elements of the sounds of Urdu, Punjabi, Pashto etc. and even people who are perhaps 3rd or 4th generation Britons have this accent, though some end up with a full blown Glaswegian accent. Usually people just pick up the accent of their closest peers. If however you are surrounded most of the time by people speaking in an accent of the region in which you are staying, then you are far more likely to end up acquiring it. If you are also aware of how to break down an accent into its constituent parts and focus on these separately, you are far more likely to succeed in imitating that accent. If however you are in an environment where most of the time you speak to people who speak in a different accent than that typical of the region, it gets more difficult as for one you get less exposure to the accent you want to imitate, and secondly you might feel a bit odd trying to learn to speak in an accent that your closest peers don't use themselves. As for the thing about using mathematics to trip people up who might otherwise have a native sounding accent and speech patterns, that is probably largely true but not always. My Grandfather was Polish and learned to speak English and German. Whenever it came to mathematics he counted in German as for some reason he preferred it as the language for mathematics. He was likely a bit of an oddity in this respect though. Edited by jazzboy.bebop on 16 June 2012 at 3:18am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Wulfgar Senior Member United States Joined 4671 days ago 404 posts - 791 votes Speaks: English* | Message 20 of 63 16 June 2012 at 8:37am | IP Logged | |||||
Good point. I bet I could fool a dentist into thinking I'm a native. 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| choca Tetraglot Newbie Germany Joined 4576 days ago 9 posts - 21 votes Speaks: German*, Spanish, Indonesian, English Studies: Modern Hebrew | Message 21 of 63 16 June 2012 at 8:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
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A while ago I spoke to a guy at a party. We had quite a long conversation and I was thinking all the time that he is German. Eventually he told me that he is american, and has been living three (3!)years in Germany. He had NO English accent at all and he didn't learn any German before he had moved here.
Second example is a friend of mine, she studied Indonesian here for maybe 2 years (the profs had a very thick German accent), the she moved to Indonesia. When I went to visit here after 1/2 year, all Indonesians told me, that she had NO accent at all and spoke a perfekt Indonesian slang. Third example, a friend who had been living only two years in Nicaruaga and spoke like a Nicaragüense. Not the slightest German accent. All of them were in their twenties. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4668 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 22 of 63 16 June 2012 at 9:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I can speak Spanish with a convincing Porteño accent. It's the easiest accent for me to imitate (since I speak my own language with an Italian accent). I can speak Portuguese with a Northeastern Brazilian accent (because I lived in Brazil as a teenager for 3 years, so I learned it through immersion). I can also imitate a Carioca accent (from Rio), and the standard Continental Portuguese accent. You don't want to sound too native-like since authorities may think you are a spy (I always speak English when I call the Brazilian embassy because I had problems in the past ''they thought I was Brazilian by the way I talked over the phone'').
Is it possible to speak like a native? This depends on a language, or more accurately: 1. the general phonology and phonetics of a language/dialect 2. the pronunciation of isolated words 3. connected speech In this case, Spanish is easier than English or Portuguese. Portuguese open and closed E's and O's are not obvious from the spelling in 80% of cases (and if you don't pronounce them right you will sound strange/foreign). In English, there are so many words which native speakers find easy to read aloud, but foreigners have to check their pronunciation in a dictionary: many foreigners would pronounce PINT with a KIT vowel instead of the diphthong [ai]. I think my English accent is decent, but I struggle with pronunciation of some words I come across, there is always a word or two in American newspapers and magazines which I don't know how to pronounce (PINT not rhyming with MINT makes me check the pronunciation of every new word I come across in English, there are just too many exceptions). If I were more interested in English-speaking countries, I would put more effort in sounding more native-like. But unfortunately, I find them all boring. I'm more into Southern Europe and Latin America. I speak English once in a blue moon, it's more of a written language to me (I use it on language and photography forums). This is one of the important factors: motivation. (Why should I sound like a native speaker of English when I never speak English in the 1st place? My English was better when I watched sitcoms and movies for 6 hours every day, so I was in contact with this language, now I don't have time for this anymore, and new sitcoms and movies made in Hollywood are so boring.)
It's relatively easy to fool people that you're a native speaker of a language X (X=name of the language), but never a speaker of the same dialect!So, if you learn English with a Texas accent, you can fool non-Texans only, most Texans will find subtle differences that will mark you as ''non-Texan'', but 99% of others will think you're from Texas. Brazilians from Northeast don't think I'm a Brazilian, but people from S. Paulo thought I were from the Brazilian Northeast. And when I went to Portugal, people asked if I was Brazilian. So...Learn a thick dialect or put on a marked accent so you can fool native speakers (except for the native speakers of that variant/dialect!!). There must be a name for this paradox. So, if you want to sound like a native speaker of Norwegian in Oslo, any WestNorwegian dialect will do ;) [Furthermore in the Hordaland area outside of Bergen (known as Strill) there are no tonal accents, so it's relatively easy to pronounce/imitate, although this may mean you'd have to be familiar with Nynorsk ;) ] Edited by Medulin on 16 June 2012 at 9:52pm 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| dampingwire Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4665 days ago 1185 posts - 1513 votes Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Japanese | Message 23 of 63 17 June 2012 at 9:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
So learn *two* dialects reasonably well and you can fool all of the people (almost) all of the time? :-) 5 persons have 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 24 of 63 18 June 2012 at 3:36am | IP Logged | |||||
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I think it is likely that some people are simply better listeners thsn others, and are
naturally more receptive to the speech of those around them, and gradually this is reflected back into the way that they themselves speak. From the anecdotes above, it seems that the younger you are immersed into a new language environment (although it's apparently not necessary to be a child), probably the better your chances are of acquiring a native-like accent. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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