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Can adult learners achieve native levels? | ||
Tags: Native Fluency | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes  Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 297 of 303 17 April 2013 at 5:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
What a listener is likely to understand is a very subjective notion: you may easily understand an accent you are familiar with while I might entirely fail to understand anything at all. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| okjhum Pentaglot Groupie Sweden olle-kjellin.com Joined 5205 days ago 40 posts - 190 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Japanese, English, German, Russian Studies: Spanish, Polish, Greek | Message 298 of 303 17 April 2013 at 5:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I learnt Japanese "as a child as an adult"! :-D
That is, as an adult I mirrored my bilingual child as she was acquiring her mother tongue, Japanese. From the very beginning I made notes of all the new words she learnt -- until I couldn't keep up with the speed of it. This was a very efficient method, like an emulation of L1 acquisition adapted to the adult learner's advantages and disadvantages. I learnt nursery rhymes and such language play that make up the foundations of any L1. My Japanese performance surprised people around me. Unfortunately, my child gradually ceased speaking Japanese after we'd moved to Sweden when she was 8, so she never developed an adult variety of Japanese. Today (37 years later) I still speak Japanese fluently (though quite a bit rusty), but she can't. So I recommend that you get a new spouse and child for every new language you want to learn well! :-D You only have to be immensely rich and get the permission to build a harem... :-D 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| casamata Senior Member Joined 4263 days ago 237 posts - 377 votes Studies: Portuguese | Message 299 of 303 17 April 2013 at 6:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
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What about this: I have two relatives from the same city in China and both have spent pretty much the same amount of time in America, over 40+ years. However, one has pretty much no accent that I can detect and commits no grammatical errors. Even their prepositions are fully native. However, the other person makes basic conjugation mistakes at times, has a slight but unmistakable accent, and doesn't speak as well as the other.
And they both speak English about 90% of the time, except for occasional Chinese at home or with relatives in China. I.E, they are fully assimilated into American culture and do everything in English, at their job, with friends, everything. Their early English exposure was identical, since they were from the same city and school system. What do people attribute this to? 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| SamD Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6660 days ago 823 posts - 987 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 300 of 303 17 April 2013 at 6:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I have to agree with okjhum about the idea of listener-friendly pronunciation. Two things are necessary for an adult learner to attain the sort of native accent that would fool a native. One is a lot of time to spend on being immersed in the target language. The other is a good ear for intonation and subtle differences between sounds.
The problem is that many adult language learners lack at least one of those things. In my job, I have scored placement tests for a university English department. If the essay sounds like it was written by someone who doesn't speak English as a native language, we have the option of writing "ESL" at the top of the page. I spent a few years teaching English as a second language, but my colleagues who have never done so are still pretty good at picking out writing by non-natives. It's one of those things that is easier to describe than define or explain, and non-native writing is not always all that bad. It's simply that non-natives frequently make mistakes that natives don't make. If you want to achieve a native level, you must do so in listening, speaking, reading and writing. You'll need to spend lots of time getting native input and native feedback in each of these areas. If you have a native accent in your speech, you may still make the sort of errors that reveal your non-native roots. That's not such a bad thing. That's why I like what okjhum said about listener-friendly pronunciation. Many adult language learners will never develop a truly convincing native accent. Because of my appearance, native speakers of Swahili, Korean or Arabic will never presume that I am a native speaker of their language no matter how good my accent is. Unless I am training to be a spy, speaking a variety of a language that gets the point across, doesn't make me the butt of jokes, and doesn't make it all that much of a nuisance to talk to me is fine with me. Edited by SamD on 17 April 2013 at 6:43pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4534 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 301 of 303 17 April 2013 at 7:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
I like the idea of aiming for 'listener-friendly pronunciation". This would fit with all the people I have known who got to C2+ in English. They don't have native accents generally, but sound fine, and are completely intelligible. In Germany you have the strange reverse, where I have met people with very good BBC style accents who are only probably B2-level in conversation. Brittleness of understanding accents varies a lot. I remember being a little shocked (as an Australian) when I found out that Mad Max had been dubbed into American English when it was first released. When I first lived in LA I needed to relearn how to say words like 'coffee'. When I was first there I pronounced the first syllable like the first syllable "cough" rather than the first syllable in caffeine. I remember being a bit put out when I ordered a coffee in Starbucks and was told by the server they didn't have a clue what I wanted. Australian English also has a soft-r which is makes asking for an iron in a hotel difficult. I also had trouble in a supermarket in Florida a few years ago asking where the beer was (pronounced closer to be-a in Australia). I still find making a stronger-r sound difficult and tend to over emphasize it when speaking so I sound a bit like a pirate in Hollywood film. Edited by patrickwilken on 18 April 2013 at 10:59am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| PillowRock Groupie United States Joined 4735 days ago 87 posts - 151 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 302 of 303 17 April 2013 at 9:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
Now you've got me trying to imagine exactly how Aussies and SoCal natives pronounce those three words. I've lived most of my life in Michigan, and the last three years in Northern Virginia. To me, the first syllable of "coffee" does sound like "cough", and the first syllable of "caffeine" doesn't sound anything like either of them. Now, some American accents tend to rotate short O sounds a bit in the direction of a short A (Jack Nicholson comes to mind), but not nearly all the way to where they sound the same. Conversely, some British accents (and possibly Aussie, too) tend to rotate some (though, I don't think all) short A sounds closer to a short O or an "AW" sound (I'm thinking of the accents when the vowel sound changes between "can" and "can't"). Maybe your "coffee" / "caffeine" pronunciation is meeting somewhere in the middle of the two? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4666 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 303 of 303 18 April 2013 at 3:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
That struck me as a bit odd, too. In my pronunciation "coffee" has exactly the same vowel sound as "off", "awe", and "cough" -- ɔ. While the initial vowel in "caffeine" is æ. Edited by tastyonions on 18 April 2013 at 3:59pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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