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Acquiring near-native pronunciation | ||
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| Aineko Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 5257 days ago 238 posts - 442 votes  Speaks: Serbian*, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin | Message 33 of 83 18 December 2010 at 9:15pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I was looking forward to Cainntear post here as I was intrigued by what he said on the other thread about acquiring a near-native accent not being some daunting, hugely time-
consuming (compared to learning other aspects of a language) task. I mentioned on the other thread that I had done a 'small' experiment in order to see how much time it would take me to get to the native production of only one word. The small experiment took about 9h and was without full success. When Cainntear mentioned MT and his accent in English, particularly his inability to distinguish between 'won't' and 'want', I paid attention and realized that I, too, don't distinguish between these words. Noone ever has picked me up for this nor I had trouble understanding if people are saying 'won't' or 'want', so I've never before paid attention to it. When Cainntear draw my attention to it, I asked my friend to say these two words for me. I heard the distinction straight away. That was around 3pm. I spent next 9h trying to get my 'won't' to sound native. I was going from one native speaker to another asking them to say it for me, to listen to me saying it back to them, to explain to me how they position their lips and tongue... When I got home, I read about how this sound is supposed to be produced, I recorded my boyfriend saying "He won't want any more crackers.", then recorded myself saying the same thing and practised and practised for hours... At the end I got the 'wo' sound right (or at least I was told so). So, let's say I spend next month and a half, 9h every day, getting my pronunciation of every English sound right - would that lead to me acquiring near-native accent? Not at all. Here is why I said that the experiment was only a partial success. Although I got the sound right, my 'won't' is still not native like. I'm adding some strange pitch into it (maybe Serbian pitch accent has something to do with it, don't know) and it definitely does not sound native. Furthermore, the fact that my 'won't' doesn't sound any more like 'want' does not mean that my 'woven' is not actually 'waven'. The fact that I know the sound doesn't mean I can put it in different words without trouble. And these two things, pitch and sound of different words, is where people with a good ear differ from people with a bad ear. Someone with a good ear will, from a lot of exposure and decent knowledge of phonology, pick up native pronunciation of different words, as well as pitch and intonation. I won't. I'm hopeless with getting these things. For me, same tone played on two different instruments is not the same tone. My brain doesn't recognize it as the same. I can't hear when someone is singing out of tune (for me, everyone sings nicely :D). I also can't hear the rhythm. I love dancing, but I can't just hear the music and dance to the rhythm. I just hear a bunch of sounds and need to be told, for each different song, what is the rhythm for that song, what do I need to listen to. I can't play any instrument (I tried), because what I learn is not which sounds need to be produced at what time, but where I'm supposed to put my fingers and that doesn't get you very far. So, I'm curious, Cainntear, how good are you with music? Given that you are mistaken for a native Spanish speaker, you are not only pronouncing sounds right, you are doing everything else right, too. It's not just about position of a tongue. I simply cat'n see any way I could practise acquisition of a near-native accent in any language, that wouldn't be daunting, time-consuming, even expensive and would have some chances of success. Not to mention a frustration factor I saw with my 'won't': when I give my best to pronounce the word native-like and ask if it's right and get negative answer again and again and I either can't here the difference (if I just speak) or can hear the difference (if I record my self and then listen to it) but can't pinpoint where it is, so I can't fix it... After four hours of this I just wanna cry :). This would certainly kill my interest in a language. So, to conclude, I don't think it is just about stretching your tongue and differences in this regard between individual learners are tremendous (much higher than for other aspects of language). In my opinion, getting native-like accent is an art and it's a great achievement. However, as I said on the other thread, language is primarily a tool and for most people it works perfectly that way. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5820 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 34 of 83 18 December 2010 at 11:23pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
This demonstrates a point that I keep trying to make: That pronunciation must be a key focus from the very beginning. Common thought is to leave accent alone, because it will improve through exposure. I say that accent has to be a key focus early on precisely because it can't improve through exposure. Why is it that learning to pronounce the difference between "won't" and "want" doesn't improve your pronunciation overall? In the other thread, I think I talked about what happened to me with Spanish. I started with Michel Thomas, which teaches Spanish with "seseo" (z, ce and ci are pronounced with an /s/ sound). When I started speaking to Spanish speakers, they all spoke with "distinción" (ie there's a distinction between z/ce/ci and s). I tried to imitate their accent and I got very poor results. In particular, I almost invariably got the two sounds the wrong way round in the word "especial", pronouncing it "ezpesial" instead. (That got more than a few laughs from my friends.) Even though I consciously knew the spelling of the word, my pronunciation was independent from that spelling, and as far as my brain was concerned, the two sounds were one. This tied in with something I had been studying around about the same time in my English study at university. It was a study of Cockney schoolkids, and their problems with initial H in words. Cockneys are historically famous for "dropping their Hs", and it was quite normal for teachers to attempt to force kids to pronounce their Hs, but the poor kids were being driven scatty by it. The study found that kids simply didn't have a model of the intial-H phoneme in their heads: they could hear it, but they couldn't make sense of it. The result was that in an attempt to do what their teachers asked, they would insert H in words, seemingly at random. But curiously, the students would be entirely consistent with using H (or not) with a particular word. As I recall it, one of the most common ones was that the words "heart" and "art" swapped places. That's exactly how I felt with the Spanish. I consciously knew what I had to say, and I could hear it when someone said it if I was paying attention, but my brain kept spitting out the wrong thing. And while there was no obvious rule, it was consistent in its mistakes. The process I went through to fix this wasn't easy. It felt to me just the same as learning new words -- as far as I'm concerned that's exactly what I was doing. The old words were built out of a single S/Z/C phoneme, and in order to get things correct, I had to learn certain ones with the S phoneme and others with a Z/C phoneme. The French teacher I mentioned in the other thread said much the same thing as you've just said and I've just said. He taught himself to pronounce some of the English phonemes that trouble French speakers, but in order to use them, he'd have to relearn all his words. I was lucky -- I hadn't learned all that many words by this point, so it wasn't a big job. But it convinced me that accent was something that had to be worked on right from the start. But I don't agree with the way Pimsleur goes about this, because Pimsleur doesn't actively help you build a phoneme map -- it leaves you to do this yourself by ear. But if you can't hear the difference, you can fall into the trap of pronouncing two sounds as one, and we're back to the problem of splitting sounds later.
Well, we'll find out next year if I actually get on TV singing that song in a language I don't speak :-))
Well you're right there, there are a lot of factors involved. I suppose singing did help me quite a bit with the rhythm of the language. In fact, a Spanish friend of mine had terrible prosody in English, but when I helped her get the rhythm right in a couple of songs she spoke better afterwards (for about 10 minutes!).
All the new sounds I've learnt in the last 6 years -- I couldn't hear the difference myself when I started. I didn't record myself and listen to myself. I didn't ask for corrections or clarifications. All I did was consciously control the physical articulation of my mouth based on what I knew was (or believed to be) correct. It didn't take much extra time, as most of my practice took part at the same time as other language practice anyway. It was a long long time before I could hear the difference, and I genuinely believe that I only learned to hear it because I had actively forced my brain to recognise its existence through pronunciation practice. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Faraday Senior Member United States Joined 5927 days ago 129 posts - 256 votes Speaks: German* | Message 35 of 83 19 December 2010 at 12:04am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Acquiring a near-native accent is:
1. achievable 2. by adults 3. without strenuous effort. This is the conclusion I've reached after watching Jerry Dai's video, reading Olle Kjellin's posts in this thread, and applying Dr. Kjellin's process to my language learning. thread His articles on prosody and pronunciation are fascinating and well-worth reading. My pronunciation's improved tremendously after reading them. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Aineko Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 5257 days ago 238 posts - 442 votes Speaks: Serbian*, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin | Message 36 of 83 19 December 2010 at 12:27am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I don't know what you are talking about but I'm curious :) - which TV, song and language?
And this, I'd say, demonstrates the point I keep trying to make :). You have good ear, you can sing, you know what the rhythm is... You have put considerable amount of effort into one aspect of native accent that good ear by itself cannot give you (correct pronunciation of difficult sounds) and you achieved native accent. Now you keep saying that anyone who put more-less same amount off effort into this very aspect of the language has good chances of acquiring native accent. I say that you totally neglect the 'good ear factor' and that it is not same for everyone. What you have done with Hindi is pretty much what I was (and still am) doing with Arabic. I may one day learn to produce Arabic sounds correctly. But everything else that constitutes native accent (prosody, pitch etc.), things for which you didn't even notice how you got them, are for me (and I guess many other learners) on a totally different level of complexity. Add to that the fact that I can't see the importance of these thing in a daily life in a foreign country/language (as I described on the other thread), and you can understand why I have the attitude I have. You say "concentrating on native accent gives you better fluency", I say such fluency is only better in that regard - native accent. (take 'only' in relative terms - it is great achievement, but not as important, in terms of practical language usage, as some other aspects of a language are, when you live and work in a foreign country). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| slucido Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Spain https://goo.gl/126Yv Joined 6484 days ago 1296 posts - 1781 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan* Studies: English | Message 37 of 83 19 December 2010 at 1:52am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Yes, you are right. It's possible to adapt the method for self learning. Dr. Kjellin answered me this question. Edited by slucido on 19 December 2010 at 12:37pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5190 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 38 of 83 19 December 2010 at 2:37am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
How do you reconcile the idea that a good ear is needed to acquire good pronunciation, and that despite being able to hear the distinction right away between want and won't, you still couldn't produce it? Something else is at cause here. I have to admit that I was a little disconcerted to read that 9 hours didn't suffice to allow you to produce want/won't. Frankly, I never saw individual sounds as a particular difficulty, other than at the very early stages of learning. Even when you've got all the sounds right, that's only a fraction of the work involved in sounding native; you'd still be a long way from the type of internalized insight needed to plan, in a split second, the intonation of an entire sentence in relation to the previous and future parts of your story. Whether a person who doesn't pay very close attention to pronunciation from the get-go is doomed to forever fight against bad habits or whether those people who, for some intrinsic lack of that ability, could never reach near-native pronunciation anyway typically put very little emphasis on sounds at the beginning is unclear to me, but I agree with Cainntear that good pronunciation starts early. However, not unlike grammar, it's a gradual process where new advances occur as you build on previous successes. And pronunciation is not the only aspect involved in sounding like a native: before one could be mistaken for a native, one would still need perfect grammar, flair, instinct and intimate knowledge of the finest details of the language, such as how natives hesitate, second-guess themselves or correct themselves mid- thought. Edited by Arekkusu on 19 December 2010 at 2:52am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Aineko Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 5257 days ago 238 posts - 442 votes Speaks: Serbian*, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin | Message 39 of 83 19 December 2010 at 4:51am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Well, exactly as I described it. Take 'a good ear' in musical sense and you will get your 'something else'. I can hear the difference, but I do not have enough of that particular talent needed to correct my own pronunciation/production, or simply said - to imitate what I hear. Same way I can't sing or play a musical instrument (or are you now going to tell me that everyone who can hear a difference between the two tones can become a professional musician? :) )
Well, I'm sorry my experience was so disturbing :D. I said that I got the production of won't/want difference (somewhere in the middle of these 9h), but not the native sounding 'won't', not even after 9h. Why? I don't know, because that's how my brain works.
exactly my point. Edited by Aineko on 19 December 2010 at 4:53am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5239 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 40 of 83 19 December 2010 at 7:12am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I'm quite familiar with Kjellin's work and agree that accent acquisition, as he calls it, can be done. I followed up on the Jerry Dai video and it would seem that the method he uses is the exact opposite of Cainntear's. His emphasis is repeating as many times as possible a series of meaningful sentences in the target language, 1 person has voted this message useful |
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