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Can you pinpoint my English Accent? | ||
Tags: Accent | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4658 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes  Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 17 of 20 04 August 2014 at 11:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
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As for your reading style, you sound a bit stiff,
as for your connected speech, it seems kinda chopped, the speech flow is not neat. As for pronunciation of sounds, you seem inconsistent/insecure when it comes to the low back merger, this is more common in L2 imitation of US English than in L1 US English. It would be better if you read song lyrics, or a dialog from a contemporary American novel (because it would sound more natural with contractions and things like that). If I were to pinpoint a giveaway word, ''thoughts '' sounded a bit off... As for articulation, American English is easier to imitate if you pronounce sounds in the back part of your mouth (rather than French and Slavic language which tend to use the front part of the mouth), and a bit more nasality wouldn't hurt either. Two ''Please call Stella'' samples of L1 North American English: http://accent.gmu.edu/searchsaa.php?function=detail&speakeri d=138 http://accent.gmu.edu/searchsaa.php?function=detail&speakeri d=519 - or two people from the Northeastern part of the state of New York using their native accent (which is like the one used in Merriam Webster's Learner's dictionary): Lana del Rey (singer from Lake Placid) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRAFNSgk1Ns Ryan Brenizer (photographer from Saranac Lake): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsMnRxmeJ74 Edited by Medulin on 04 August 2014 at 11:43pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5371 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 18 of 20 05 August 2014 at 5:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
This sounds like a contradiction to me. He does exhibit low back merger in the short excerpts we have, and thus "thoughts" is said as it should be, ie. the vowel rhymes with the "a" in "father".
I'm sorry, but that doesn't mean anything. Actually, it's definitely false for vowels like ae, for instance, that are higher and more forward in American English than in most other dialects. In any case, it's not very helpful to say that sounds are in the back part of the mouth -- after all, only h, k and g are really in the back, and if you generally include vowels as being in the back, then they are so close together that it's not a useful thing to say and all vowels can't be moved back as a whole. And to me, his nasality sounds fine. Actually, the only thing that sounds slightly and subtly unexpected to me -- although I wouldn't go as far as to say that it doesn't sound native, and it is probably simply a personal trait -- is what I would clumsily describe as a kind of excessive linking and lack of weight and definition around focus points (stressed words in a phrase): for instance, in "then I fried some eggs and bacon", the diphthong in "fried" is so short that the word doesn't bear the emphasis you'd expect a verb to have, and in "friend who I haven't seen in a few months", the part "who I haven't" is crushed into 3 syllables, making "I" almost inaudible. A common point here is that both cases show that the diphthong "ai" was too short, except that this sound was ok in other instances. Again, might simply be a personal trait. I'm not a native speaker of Enligh, so I'd be curious to hear what others think. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Kartof Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5056 days ago 391 posts - 550 votes Speaks: English*, Bulgarian*, Spanish Studies: Danish | Message 19 of 20 06 August 2014 at 3:06am | IP Logged | |||||
While the rest of your comment is your rightful opinion to the recordings I've posted, I'd just like to point out that I am in no way "imitating" American English, any more than any other American "imitates" it. My post was merely asked if I sound like I have a foreign accent, not for advice to change it, which I never intended to do. This is the way I speak American English, the language I am strongest and most comfortable in. If I speak such broken American English, then surely I don't speak any languages at all... 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5120 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 20 of 20 06 August 2014 at 4:31am | IP Logged | |||||
It's the way a lot of Americans speak English. I wouldn't let a non-native English speaker bother me with their criticism, considering that 1) the US is an awfully big place with lots of variation in its English and 2) we're such a mobile and connected society these days that, unless you've never left a very small area in your life, you're very likely to have some influence from other accents and dialects as well as a strong local one. You sound nothing but native to me. R. == 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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