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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Melisse Triglot Newbie Sweden Joined 4869 days ago 19 posts - 36 votes Speaks: English*, SwedishC1, French Studies: Dutch, Russian, Modern Hebrew | Message 1 of 9 06 February 2012 at 5:40pm | IP Logged | ||
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Wow! This is a long post. If you want to get right to the point then skip down to the line-break.
A while ago, someone on this forum started a thread about accents. In my reply, to whatever the question was, I stated that I am able to do a pretty decent Russian accent despite not speaking Russian. I said that I believe it is because I have lots of Russian friends and family back in LA, and after hearing them speak so much I became able to imitate their accents. My thinking was and has been that simply being surrounded by people who speak a certain way will make it very easy to start talking like them. But then I started thinking about my current situation with Swedish. I have been living in Sweden since late 2009. I started studying and speaking Swedish as soon as I got here, but I still, for the life of me cannot sound even remotely Swedish. So why is it that at one time I was able to do such a good Russian accent, so good that I could fool Russian speakers into thinking I was one of them but I am unable to imitate a Swedish accent despite living here for over 2 years, interacting with Swedish speakers every single day and actually speaking Swedish? After thinking about it I’ve realized something: I was imitating the accent of one specific person: my former co-worker Valentina. I worked side by side with Valentina, a Russian speaker with a heavy accent, for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for over 3 years. I’ve heard her help thousands of customers both in person and on the phone in both Russian and English. I’ve heard her sound professional, casual, angry, excited, tired etc. I’ve heard her scream and whisper and cry. I’ve heard her speak at a meeting in front of 100 people and I’ve heard her drunk after a late night at the bar. It was this exposure that allowed me to start talking like her, unconsciously at first, without ever making any real effort to do so. It is not a Russian accent I was putting on, but rather a Valentina accent. And so it hit me: this is what I need in Swedish. I need a Swedish Valentina! Unfortunately it is impossible for me replicate this exact situation even though I live in Sweden. An odd set of work/study/living circumstances make it so that I don’t have this kind of extensive, intimate, prolonged contact with any one Swede. And I imagine it’s much worse for people who are not living in the country of the language that they are studying. ------ So if I can’t spend every day for 3 years next to a native speaker who I can imitate, and I obviously have trouble catching the ‘general essence’ of an accent as heard from a large number speakers, I think that the next best thing is to choose someone well known, an actress or a celebrity, to imitate. Instead of trying to get a general “Standard Swedish” accent or whatever, shoot for the accent of one specific person, so that the intonation and pronunciation are consistent and there is a smaller range of sounds for people with tone-deaf ears( like me) to process. So who is a good candidate? Newscasters don’t cut it because we only ever hear them reading the news and that’s not natural speech. Politicians are slightly better because we can hear them give speeches, debate and do interviews, but I still don’t think they fit the bill for this purpose. The type of person who I think would make the best candidate is someone who has a lot of audio available on the internet, preferably for free, who has been recorded over an extended period of time and who can be heard in a wide variety of situations including professional and casual. A good example for American English would be Ellen DeGeneres. Ellen has been around for a long time and has done a lot of work. She currently does the Ellen DeGeneres show which can be watched online. A You Tube search for her turns up over 150,000 results. She has done stand- up comedy for a long time and has a CD out. She has done voice-over work including the voice of Dora the fish on Finding Nemo. She has been in commercials and has acted in over a dozen movies. Throughout all of the work she has done, she can be heard in wide range of situations: Serious, casual, funny, angry, scared, screaming. She does everything from stand-up comedy to serious interviews. She has even narrated her own audio book. The woman is a gold mine of audio! She’s still alive and thus, using current speech. She’s educated. And she’s funny. Someone of a different age or gender would need to find somebody else. Obviously it would be weird if a 15 year old guy started talking like Ellen. But I think that any woman who is about Ellen’s age (she’s 54) and who wants to sound more American, could benefit from imitating Ellen and I think that the amount of (mostly free) material she has out there makes her a really good candidate for this. Ellen is from Louisiana, and that can be heard in her speech, but her accent isn’t so heavy that it should deter anyone from using her as a speech model if one just wants an ‘American sounding’ accent and doesn’t care which region it comes from. Now, this type of single-person-accent-source is obviously easy to find for people studying American English. There are so many personalities to choose from and there is so much material. But for those of us studying smaller languages, like Swedish for instance, it can be hard to tell what our choices are. I personally would love to hear some suggestions like this for Swedish, French and Dutch, just for my own benefit. But I think it would be really be helpful if people could list some suggestions of similar people in other languages. Have you ever done this? Who did you use a speech model? (is speech model the right term?) Who would you suggest to a learner of your native language? Who is someone that is easily accessible on the internet, who has lots of recorded audio available, who can be heard in a wide variety of situations (speeches, acting, interviews, audio books etc)? Who would be a good candidate for a learner to model their speech on? Edited by Melisse on 06 February 2012 at 5:46pm 13 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5380 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes  Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 2 of 9 06 February 2012 at 6:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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I’d like to challenge your assumption that you need to imitate a single person. I realize this was your model for what you consider previous success, but there is a difference between fooling someone once, and mastering a native-sounding accent with consistency. To quote your own words, you have a "pretty decent Russian accent despite not speaking Russian". I don't understand that as meaning native-like.
The ultimate goal is to express yourself through a native-sounding accent that allows you to be yourself, not someone else, and to do it with the flexibility that varying situations command. If you analyze how you speak in your native language, you will notice that it not only changes based on the setting, but also on the person you are speaking with. We also acquire our native accent through finding our identity among a community of speakers. Our language eventually reflects the language we are exposed to within a larger community. Other members have expressed that you can’t sound native unless you sound like you come from a specific place, but we know that’s not even true among native speakers. Many people move throughout their lives and acquire non-localized accents or else develop accents that differ from the one used by most people living in the same locale -- and yet, they still sound native. A native-sounding accent is a combination of a lot of things, including consistency and flexibility, and are not tied to a geographic location or to a given person. I never targeted a single person to imitate in any of my languages. Instead, I always aimed for a general understanding of how native speakers express themselves in a variety of situations. There is otherwise no way to know what is normal or common, or what is the quirky habit of one or a few individuals. I copy whoever I happen to hear on TV or in person, and my experience has shown me that over time, this yields a more or less neutral accent (localized over a much larger area) that belongs to me and that I can manipulate to my own communicative needs. So instead of trying to find one speaker to copy, I suggest you copy them all. Edited by Arekkusu on 06 February 2012 at 7:07pm 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5225 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 3 of 9 07 February 2012 at 4:16am | IP Logged | ||
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I concur with Arekkussu: you need to imitate an ideal model that would an interpolation of how every one of them speaks.
Also, I have a different view on why your Russian accent was so good, and your Swedish so bad, assuming that is the truth and not only your perception. As a native speaker you've been perfectly trained through the years to put every piece of your vocal equipment (tongue, teeth, glottis...) in the right areas and positions and move them the right way to produce any given English sound, even if you're not consciously aware of how you do it. When a foreign speaker does it in a slightly different position (because [s]he lacks those years of training), it immediately strikes you as a bit off, and you can easily duplicate it, maybe after a bit of practice. But when you face a foreign language it is the other way around. Except if you're told beforehand what to do with your mouth, you deduce what every individual sound must be like from what you hear. Even assuming you get it right*, you're on the other side - you'll still likely need lots of practice and feedback on what's off to be able to produce every given sound 'correctly', i.e. the exact same way that natives produce it. *As an adult, even if you are raised bilingual or whatever, all you ever heard is composed of the same few tens of individually distinct sounds (what we call phonemes) -- those of the languages you grew speaking. This makes most people develop an inability to perceive how some foreign phonemes are different from the ones they know, thus they cannot reproduce these properly and they speak with an accent. This can usually be overcome but it can take a lot of work. Even for individuals who can tell right away that a given phoneme in a foreign language is different and thus absent from their native tongue(s) set, usually they have had such little exposure to it that they need training to produce it. The optimal solution for you is very likely to simply study Swedish phonology comparing it to English. And I mean learning what all the phonemes are and how they are produced so you can spot the differences. Then practice, practice and practice. Edited by mrwarper on 07 February 2012 at 4:20am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4706 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 4 of 9 07 February 2012 at 4:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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Learning a native accent to perfection - including the proper intonation and stress patterns and the whole malarkey (my new favourite word) - is a pretty difficult thing, or so I'm told. There's such a thing as a very good accent, one that is very close to what you might call the "standard" accent so as to not warrant a mention for being substantially different - but even for those people, often, hints of accents slip through in the way they pronounce certain sounds.
I was told by a linguist yesterday that this sort of ability (to entirely replicate a foreign accent) is very rare and doesn't really happen a lot. So near-native accents or things that get very close exist - but with good instruction, you can, obviously, get quite close. But that's a matter of immersion, recognising sounds, and then being able to produce these sounds. I imagine that is quite a difficult thing if you don't have extended immersion and practice in any language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5225 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 5 of 9 07 February 2012 at 8:28pm | IP Logged | ||
If you don't spend time in the country you get lots less feedback, so it must be way more difficult even if you study the language phonology. Still, it's doable. I wouldn't really rely a lot on statements by linguists who haven't learnt one or more languages themselves, for obvious reasons. While a natural ability to replicate accents must be somewhat rare (otherwise good accents would outnumber bad ones, and this is accordance with what I said above), I think the main reason why we don't get better accents in general is a complete neglect of the question among teachers, language programs and even learners themselves (I have had maybe two students who cared about this in total, and not from the beginning anyway), and such neglects only loop to reinforce themselves: Phonology is neglected by the teacher/learner -> High 'bad accent' rates -> Conclusion: it's not so important -> It is not taught / studied... 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4700 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 6 of 9 11 February 2012 at 4:00am | IP Logged | ||
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I see where you are coming from when you say that one can compare a foreigner's accent easily to one's own, native one. Then again, I once watched a youtube video of a woman imitating a whole bunch of different accents perfectly. That woman also happens to train actors, so she's doing stuff like this professionally.
I think the idea to adapt a role model's speech patterns, pronunciation, intonation and what have you, is actually a great step in the right direction. It might not be a miracle cure, but very good training wheels. Like mnemonics while learning new vocabulary, you'll probably forget those when you no longer need them. They enable you to build a nice base. Having said that, if anyone has a good role model for Japanese (male speaker), 教えてください ;) Edited by atama warui on 11 February 2012 at 4:01am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6702 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 7 of 9 11 February 2012 at 9:11am | IP Logged | ||
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I can understand that people who participate in courses and who don't listen much to the target language outside the course may take after their teacher - but at least that is not something that will happen to me because I don't participate in courses. However in one case I can se that one person has played a role simply by providing the majority of my training materials, and that's Scots. The source is of course the Big Yin, Billy Connally, whae is fouthily reprasented an Youtube.
2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4706 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 8 of 9 11 February 2012 at 10:52am | IP Logged | ||
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I wouldn't really rely a lot on statements by linguists who haven't learnt one or more languages themselves, for obvious reasons.
Yeah, but she'd studied at least three or four. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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