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"Perfect Pronunciation" | ||
Tags: Greek | Pronunciation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6364 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 113 of 131 06 January 2012 at 9:40am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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As Arekkusu's post hints, I'm pretty sure perfect pronunciation has little to do with effort or method. They probably influence it to a certain extent, but the biggest factor by far is some sort of talent, whether inborn or formed in early years. I've passed as a native in English, and what I did to learn English was no different from what all other Swedes do: watch a lot of movies and study the language in school. Even more telling, my accent is good in all my languages, just like Arrekusu (though in most I'll fail the "native speaker" test because of lack of fluidity and vocab). The methods I have used for my languages vary widely:
* I absorbed English at a young age through movies, computer games and some study in school. * I studied French in school for many years using very traditional methods. * I studied Mandarin through ChinesePod for a couple of years, during which I had no spoken contact whatsoever with natives, teachers or other learners (that is, no-one corrected my pronunciation for several years). I then spent a year in southern China. * With Cantonese, I pretty much learned it by first writing it and then speaking it, using a dictionary as I went along. I was using the language with natives from the beginning (except for some basic Pimsleur and tone drills I'd done back home). The methods are all over the place, yet my pronunciation consistently gets earnest compliments, no matter what the language. I think it's a telltale sign that most people with a good accent seem to have it across all their languages. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6221 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 114 of 131 10 January 2012 at 1:05am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
I don't feel that I can accurately judge accents as native; I've made plenty of mistakes trying, usually in the direction of mistaking non-native speakers for native ones. That said, I certainly wouldn't identify you as non-native in English. I'm yet to hear or see you make a mistake, too. I've had quite a few years of formal musical training.
Interesting. Your answers are rather similar to atamagaii's on this point.
Eminently sensible. It's eye-opening to see how you look at pronunciation. I'm still piecing my understanding together. Thank you for a particularly cognizant contribution. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5793 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 115 of 131 10 January 2012 at 1:48pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
I have been mistaken for a Spanish person quite a few times, or a South American. My accent tends to be accepted as "native", but it's all mixed up so no-one has would guess any particular location.
My first exposure to a foreign language was singing in French as an infant (even though I didn't speak the language, I was mistaken for a French kid when singing in France) -- this may mean I already had an internal model of phonemic distinctions that aren't present in English before I ever started another language. Certainly, even though my Spanish is stronger than my French, the sounds of French are more "comfortable" to my ear than any other language (excluding Scots and English, of course). How much this helped me is impossible to know. However, I didn't do any study of phonology or accent at high school when I started learning French properly, and my accent was always considered very good. I didn't do any real study of sounds when I picked up Italian later at high school. Anyway, years later, when I started learning languages again, I picked up Spanish and (Scottish) Gaelic. But at the same time, I was studying English with some basic linguistics, and was learning about voiced distinctions vs aspirate distinctions (ie the different T/D, P/B, C/G distinctions that exist in different languages), which is something that was not clearly taught to me in either Spanish or Gaelic. I also decided to pick up a little bit of Hindi, as I was working in IT support, and spent half my day on the phone with colleagues in India. Hindi has 4 Ts and 4 Ds, so I had to learn to pronounce individual distinctions of voicing and aspiration, and between dental, alveolar (not in Hindi for T or D) and retroflex articulation. I believe that this is the most important part of my study,because even though I'd been learning Spanish for several years without knowing that the primary T/D distinction is aspiration, when I got lost in Spain because I'd mixed up a few letters in a street name, I had a framework to understand the corrected input against. The awareness of distinctions was of immediate help to Gaelic though, as when I read a very brief description of the distinction (which wouldn't have been understandable if I didn't already understand the difference) I could immediately apply what I already knew in a different context (Hindi) to the new context (Gaelic). Anyway, the main thing I did was to try to think of pronunciation as a process, not as a series of definitive fixed points -- for example, I didn't think of the soft and hard Vs and Ds of Spanish as different sounds, but rather of the soft intervocalic versions as a "lazy" version of the hard non-intervocalic sound. I did the same thing with lenition in Gaelic, trying to pronounce the lenited sound as an adapted version of the parent sound... which helped me with my Spanish, because a lenited Gaelic S is a [h] sound, so when I heard words like España, estoy in Andalucian accents for the first time, the pronunciation Ehpaña, ehtoy still sounded like an S to me. Even pronunciations like E.paña and e.toy weren't difficult, because lenition is a process that tends towards hiatus and eventual loss of consonants. I used to say I didn't shadow, but then someone said I spoke with a hint of Mexican, which reminded me that I had done a small amount of shadowing while watching DVDs (including a few with Gael García Bernal). I watched a lot of DVDs with English subtitles on, but I really didn't pay much attention to the soundtrack, although after 3 or 4 years of watching mostly subtitled stuff in French, Spanish and Gaelic, I did start to develop the ability to split my attention. As a technique for learning it's not great, simply because it takes so long to learn... I also went through a relatively short period of reading stuff out loud that I didn't understand.
My philosophy is one of "maximal distinction". IE. I make a distinction between S and Z, and between Y and LL, and I didn't care whether these two distinctions exist in the same accent/dialect or not. This (I believe) keeps it clear in my head the full phonemic structure of the language, and I always felt that knowing the phoneme is the most important step -- one you have a stable phoneme map, changing your accent seems fairly easy.
That's unnecessary if you look at pronunciation as a system -- different accents become extra data to help you understand the system as a whole: specifically the boundaries between phonemes and pairs of sounds that undergo parallel changes according to accent. Theoretically, though, I would love to try to learn a very specific form of a language -- unfortunately the reality would mean limiting the available material too much to be able to guarantee results, so I'll stick with the broad way for now.
I wouldn't say you're wrong -- the biggest factor by far does seem empirically to be an individual talent or "knack", but that may simply be down to the average quality of instruction at the moment. The lack of an effective, widely-adopted method doesn't mean that method isn't relevant! As I often say, I believe the fundamental learning patterns of successful learners are far more alike than the various "methods". IE, we as learners take a lot of widely varying material, but use them in very similar ways -- identify those similarities and you get one step closer to a "universal" method. But you have the problem of "recall bias" -- you talk about your methods being all over the place, but the method is far easier to remember than what you did -- you've got the book, you can look back over it, you can see the whole thing at any time. What you actually do is ephemeral, transitory. You have no lasting record and no overall picture, so it's just not that easy to recall. (As I said above, I'd forgotten about shadowing Gael García Bernal up until someone told me I sounded Mexican -- recall isn't trustworthy.) 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 4912 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 116 of 131 10 January 2012 at 3:59pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
Not to doubt you, Cainntear, but that's an awfully broad statement. A Spanish native will readily be able to discern a South/Central American accent and vice-versa. If it's "all mixed up" you don't have any particular native accent. You have a native-like accent - a perfectly acceptable and good goal, I might add. Even though no-one can guess your particular nationality due to this native-like accent, there's a difference between the two that a real native will hear in short order. R. == Edited by hrhenry on 10 January 2012 at 3:59pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Superking Diglot Groupie United States polyglutwastaken.blo Joined 6425 days ago 87 posts - 194 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Mandarin | Message 117 of 131 10 January 2012 at 5:38pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
Perfection in any realm of life, but more specifically in language acquisition, is to me akin to the concept of "limits" in calculus. To use a simple example, the limit of the equation "1/x" for values of x getting closer and closer to infinity is zero. You never actually *reach* zero, because even 1/(10^99999999) is an infinitesimally small fraction with some non-zero value. You get ever closer to 0 the bigger x gets, without ever touching it. Perfection is not an objective concept because it always refers to an established, and often idealized, standard. For example, "perfect" pronunciation refers to pronunciation that equals that of a native speaker. But don't native speakers make mistakes in their speaking? I do all the time; does that mean that there is something wrong with my speech? No, it means that the objective that L2 learners are striving for is one based on a platonic ideal that can never be reached completely. The reason I bothered writing all that out is just to say that we always have more work to do. I have near-native pronunciation in Spanish although with such wide exposure to different dialects, I might get some mixed up occasionally. But, I still make mistakes and struggle with certain things; I occasionally trip over words that have Ls and Rs close together, I let vowels become schwas, etc, but they're mistakes I'm conscious of and work to correct. I started when I was 16 and I'm 27 now. I know 16 isn't exactly "after adolescence," but nevertheless I used a method that I still use in adulthood when I take on a new language. All accents and pronunciation patterns are things, whether it's place of articulation, relative tone where tonality is phonemic, length of vowels, etc. that every human being on earth CAN do (barring a speech impediment or other disorder). Babies can learn any sound humans are capable of making, and quickly adapt to those used by the people around them and tune out the ones that don't seem to make a difference to them. Babies growing up in an English-speaking family aren't going to grow up differentiating between the sound of Mandarin "x" and "sh" because it doesn't change the meaning of words. Meanwhile a monolingual Spanish speaking child won't pick up the difference in sound between "itch" and "each" readily, or the difference between "yellow" and "Jell-O." So my objective from early on was to figure out what those sounds were so I could train my ear to hear them and use them. For this, Wikipedia was extremely helpful, because literally every sound on the IPA chart has its own article with a sound file demonstrating it. I did this with great effectiveness, for example, with softened version of the letter G present between vowels, in words like "vago" or "agarrar." I read the descriptions, painstakingly copied the sound I heard in the audio file, and started using it where appropriate in my study of the language. It very much opened up a door for me, since once you know HOW the sound is produced physically, it's a lot easier to attune yourself to hearing it. On top of that, years of exposure to native Spanish speakers has of course bolstered what I learned by myself, but focusing on the phonetics from the beginning set a great foundation for me. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5163 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 118 of 131 10 January 2012 at 5:59pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
Speaking like a native speaker means that you might make mistakes, but that you'll make the same kinds of mistakes native speakers make. In other words, speaking like a native speaker means that you are imperfect, but only insofar as a native speaker would be. So I disagree about your notion of perfection. You need perfect control, understanding and feel for the language, but it doesn't have to be perfection per se. Speaking of mistakes natives make, I had to have a chuckle in this video at 5:55 (http://www.fluentin3months.com/mandarin-mission/)... Yes, even native speakers screw up sounds sometimes. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5116 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 119 of 131 10 January 2012 at 6:34pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
That is not entirely accurate. Not all native speakers are familiar with the different accents, and just notice that it is not their own. Most of the time people recognize my Andalusian accent, but since some of the Andalusian traits, like dropping the d and s at the end of the syllable, are also present in Latin-American dialects, I can not count the number of times both Spaniards and Latin-Americans have asked me if I was from Latin-America, in spite of the fact that I differentiate between c and s. In Cuba I was even asked if I was from the south of Cuba. My husband still finds that one hillarious. I have also been asked if I was from the US and from France, but usually after extremely short interchanges, so it wouldn't count. I do not qualify in any event, since I started my main languages before I was 15. I do agree with Ari that this is mostly about talent. If you do not have the talent, you can work on it to improve it, but if you have it, it just comes naturally, without any particular effort. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 4912 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 120 of 131 10 January 2012 at 7:05pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
I believe you on this, but there's what I think is a pretty significant difference between what you say and what Cainntear says. You learned your Spanish at a fairly early age and primarily in one place. Cainntear said his accent is "all mixed up" and that was the reason people thought he was a native. It's much easier to think someone is a native if their accent is consistent, even if different than the local spoken variety. If you're mixing accents, well... not so much. R. == 1 person has voted this message useful |
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