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Who has the worst accent? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6362 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 41 of 91 21 October 2011 at 5:18am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
This is interesting. I always assumed Japanese had the narrowest register, and English the broadest. Does anybody have stats/charts on this? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5505 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 42 of 91 21 October 2011 at 8:02am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I definitely wouldn't pick English as having the broadest phonemic inventory, partially because Americans stereotypically have such trouble pronouncing and correctly hearing "foreign" sounds. In the Wikipedia entry for "phoneme", I found this claim:
Interesting observation about English having a wide variety of vowels but not so much variation when it comes to consonants. That makes sense to me. The article goes on to say:
So, if this is true, Arabic isn't quite a super-language with ALL the sounds... but maybe it comes pretty close. Edited by Jinx on 21 October 2011 at 8:04am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 4868 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 43 of 91 21 October 2011 at 8:51am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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The amount of vowels or consonants does not directly correspond with the ability to
pronounce foreign words, because the sounds and its combinations are different. For example, Russians have lots of trouble with English consonants although Russian is very rich in consonants. Diphtongs don't influence the difficulty of pronunciation. Spanish diphtongs and triphtongs don't cause any problems to Russians. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4721 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 44 of 91 21 October 2011 at 10:19am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I have to confess, I was surprised when I first saw this poll, and surprised by its defenders as well. Perhaps the title was poorly worded. But the OP had the opportunity to clarify in the first post, but still uses the word "worst":
As others have pointed out, the poll far too vague for answers to be based in fact. It is not asking about our experience of individual speakers. It is asking us to judge whole continents (even a hemishere). The poll is asking us to do nothing but state our prejudices and further stereotypes. It completely ignores individuality. Even if it had been worded better, the poll is still asking us to paint broad strokes about whole regions of the world. OK, I can accept (possibly) that doing this does not involve racism, but that doesn't mean it's not prejudice. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5242 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 45 of 91 21 October 2011 at 2:02pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I know that the OP must be cringing and thinking, "What is s_allard going to say next?" Be assured that I won't revisit the issues of poor wording, involuntary prejudice and judging entire continents. I would like to look more at the question of basic design weakness. Just what exactly is the poll trying to measure? Here there is a huge problem. If you look at the answers given by people who did not object to the poll in general, you see that people are confusing accent with general proficiency.
Let's use as our base language English. Can we say that speakers of Chinese are harder to understand in English than speakers of Russian? But we have to compare speakers of the same level of proficiency. Let's take two sets of highly proficient speakers (around CEFR C1 and C2), would the speakers of Chinese be harder to understand? I'm not that sure. Now, let's go to the other extreme and take a class of beginners. Again would the Chinese be harder to understand than the beginning Russians? Maybe. I'm not so sure either. What I am sure of is that highly educated persons who are proficient in English are probably equally intelligible regardless of their geographic origins. But if you compare the spoken English of beginner Chinese speakers with that of highly proficient Russian speakers of English, the Chinese speakers will certainly be harder to understand. In passing, it is interesting to note the example of Michel Thomas who was the language teacher to the stars of Hollywood--he charged up to $50,000 for a week of private instruction. There is also a very popular line of Michel Thomas self-learning language products. If you listen to the recordings with Michel Thomas himself (in French, German, Italian and Spanish), you cannot help but notice quite a strong Polish accent. (Personally, I have always been amused by the thought that there must be thousands of people attempting to speak French with a Polish accent.) Despite this accent, Michel Thomas is totally intelligible. But I would hardly jump to the conclusion that all speakers of Polish are equally intelligible in English. It is interesting to note that some posters pointed out how certain regional English accents can be hard to understand. Here of course we are dealing with native speakers. But it's all a matter of perspective and exposure. I can find certain Australian speakers hard to understand but they understand each other perfectly and they probably find my English hard to understand. It is equally true however that certain varieties of English are dominant in the radio, television, movies and in the teaching of English. These form a sort of so-called standard spoken American English or standard British English that nearly everybody can understand. This is what we usually use as the baseline when we speak of regional varieties or dialects. All of this admittedly long-winded prose to say that this poll is utterly useless. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| strikingstar Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 4985 days ago 292 posts - 444 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, Cantonese, Swahili Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written) | Message 46 of 91 21 October 2011 at 2:48pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Well until leosmith steps forward to clarify what he was trying to achieve when he
created this poll, we're all only able to infer (rightly or wrongly) what his intentions were. And you can easily say that many polls on this forum are just as useless. E.g: "Should I study language A or language B?" - Make up your own danged mind. It's your decision. "Which language is most interesting?" - Totally subjective. Everyone has a different opinion what's interesting and everyone has different interests. Is there supposed to be a definitive or a one-size-fits-all answer? "Which language is more difficult?" - See above. "One Category IV language or three Category I languages?" - See above. "Is Pimsleur better than RS?" - Different strokes for different folks. Maybe leosmith just wanted to suss out opinions and generate discussion. In that, the poll hasn't been entirely useless. And of course he could have worked on the wording so that everyone's at least on the same wavelength. Or maybe it was just frivolous fun. Edited by strikingstar on 21 October 2011 at 2:54pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Jinx Triglot Senior Member Germany reverbnation.co Joined 5505 days ago 1085 posts - 1879 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Catalan, Dutch, Esperanto, Croatian, Serbian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish, Yiddish | Message 47 of 91 21 October 2011 at 4:02pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I don't like to quote myself, but I think you may have missed this line from the article I quoted, so I'll repeat it here:
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4721 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 48 of 91 21 October 2011 at 5:21pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
It's not the wording that's at fault here. It is the breadth of the survey: the fact that it asking about accents of entire continents. And it's certainly not "frivolous fun" to peg an entire continent of people as having the "worst" accent. 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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