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Comment by ldd | Hacker News Reader

Life is unfair.

As a person with an accent, I am very well aware that I will be judged by it. Just like fat people are judged for being fat, or stupid people for being stupid.

Yet, I have found solace in the ideas brought forward by thinkers like Marcus Aurelius, and my mentality has changed drastically. Yes, I have an accent, and yes, that means that certain people will openly mock me. In fact, the only time I was bullied in high school was due to my accent. I try very hard, everyday, to practice my pronunciation, and I still fail.

I try hard to be understood. I try hard to be positive and to be kind and gentle towards others. Ultimately, this is what matters, and not whether I have an accent or not.

Haters are going to hate.

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> I try very hard, everyday, to practice my pronunciation, and I still fail.

This is the sort of thing makes me feel sad. I don't feel bad for ESL university professors who are impossible to understand because they won't bother to pay for accent training which is entirely within their reach.

I'm glad that have a good attitude about it though.

> I try very hard, everyday, to practice my pronunciation, and I still fail.

You're missing some realization. Get a pronunciation trainer to help you. Anyone can overcome their accents - actors do it all the time. The tongue is a muscle that can learn new tricks, but you need a mirror and an expert guiding you. It should take you no time with help if you are an intelligent person.

I'm not a native speaker but I have native-level speaking skills that I acquired through practice. Having an accent while possessing an IQ above 110 is laziness.

Laziness? To learn a second language takes a long, long time. I remember reading "4400 hours" somewhere.

If you don't have an accent, congratulations, but it's not solely because of how hard-working you are, it's also because you learned the language while you were young.

I have yet to meet a single person who speaks a second language without an accent who began their study as an adult.

https://voxy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/110329-VOXY...

An infographic I found once regarding approximate time to learn a language for English speakers.

> I have yet to meet a single person who speaks a second language without an accent who began their study as an adult.

I've met a couple, but they're indeed very rare. Although English may not have been their second language, it may have been more like 4 or 5, perhaps that made a difference.

Learning a language requires a lot of tedious work. Learning a new accent can be done in an afternoon: All you have to do is: (1) learn a few new phonemes, (2) learn how they combine, (3) learn how they map to the accent you already are familiar with, (4) practice the mapping. Compared to the thousands of words, grammar rules, idioms, culture differences, the two kinds of effort are hardly comparable.

Laziness might be a strong word, but I agree.

If you put effort in it, you can overcome. I always wonder why some people who emigrate from other countries (like myself) don't bother to put more effort in integration. It's always better to blend in.

While it's arguably easier to learn vocabulary as an adult, it's certainly easier to learn an accent as a youngster.

If someone is even able to communicate in a second language, they've likely already put in a whole lot of time and effort to get to that point. Yet there are a lot of armchair quarterbacks in the world (especially unilingual people, I suspect) who are happy to trivialize the efforts of immigrants who haven't reached fluency.

It makes little sense to assume there are just a bunch of lazy foreigners in the world there who enjoy punishing themselves. Learning a second language, as an adult, takes time. Learning to speak without any accent whatsoever, once the learner is middle-aged is probably impossible, aside from a savant here and there.

I do not have a good defence as to why I have an accent, but I'll try to clarify my position.

Yes, it is true that you can get rid of an accent, and that you can overcome certain limitations that arise out of the 'state of affairs of the world'. I do not deny this.

Yet, sometimes you need a lot of effort to overcome certain obstacles. Perhaps I am somewhat inefficient with my efforts, and I should try harder. Or at the very least, consider asking for a tutor. In spite of that, I hope that you understand that we do want to blend in, and just like 'fat people', we sometimes lack the tools to appropriately do so.

So, in conclusion, I do not disagree with what you say, but I'll choose to focus on the actual actions that I can take to communicate more effectively. Right now, that means finding coaches that help with pronunciation.

> Having an accent while possessing an IQ above 110 is laziness.

Hogwash. We already have scientific studies showing that your native language processing blinds you to perception of certain non-native language characteristics as it optimizes on your way to adulthood.

Chinese tones, for example, are quite hard for native US English speakers to process because our language brain circuitry ignores them. The Japanese have a very difficult time perceiving the difference between "r" and "l". The process of reactivating that perception requires a lot of immersion and a lot of work.

I suspect that the people who don't speak with an accent fall into one of three categories: 1) child learners 2) those very rare individuals with exceptional neural plasticity or 3) people who have spent a VERY long time in a country.

I know people who have been in the US from foreign countries for 30 years and still have an accent. They are very hard to get rid of, and simply talking to a speaker with your native accent can reactivate it again.

> requires a lot of immersion and a lot of work

In other words, requires one not to be lazy.

Someone who learns a foreign language as an adult can hardly be called "lazy".

Fixing an accent is something that I would place under "hugely diminishing returns".

My classical guitar tremolo is quite poor. It would cost me probably 1,000 hours to fix--and at that point I'd probably be average. I have a LOT of other things in my guitar work that I would be far better spending that time on.

Similarly for a foreign language. Would I be better off fixing my horrible American accent in my Mandarin, or would I be better off learning 10,000 more words or kanji? As I am not a foreign language interpreter or teaching in China, the words and kanji have FAR more utility for me. And, to be fair, I would be even better off to learn one of the other dialects like Cantonese.

Time is finite.

I have some eastern European friends who have taken training classes to help reduce their accent with English. Even as much as it's unfair and biased for people to make assumptions based on accent, they still saw the cost as an investment into their careers and went through with it.

I think that's the right attitude. The point is to communicate clearly and in a powerful manner—for everyone. You can have the most Native accent and yet communicate poorly. Or you can have a foreign accent but work on aspects of it to communicate clearly. At the same time, Native speakers, too, should work on their comprehension skills, especially in increasingly diverse societies.

Haters gonna hate. But you don't even need them. If you speak clearly and proudly, those who need to understand, will.

>Haters are going to hate.

I am more optimistic. Major advances of equality and discrimination prevention in many countries empirically prove that some haters will, in fact, stop hating.

That's a really good point.

I've perceived more of this sort:

"OK these gay people are not evil after all. But this other group, they are evil! I don't hate anybody, but hating evil people doesn't count!!!"

Works out pretty well if you focus on the evil in hateful people. Everybody's fine, only the hateful deserve hate! Let's hate the hateful!

I mean, this is exactly the mechanism through which we've been able to build villages, cities, countries, and even (quite longstanding) multilateral pacts. Civilisation stands on the shoulders of atrophied fear of the other.

what kind of accent do you have? I used to laugh at other's accents (even though I have one myself) and was very immature until I started learning a 3rd language and appreciating language itself.

It's just horrid to laugh deliberately at someone for how they speak. I know of several people that have a heavy pompous Indian/British accent, but their knowledge of English is 100x my own ability. I should be laughing at myself.

My mother tongue is Spanish, my second tongue is English and my third tongue is French. I grew up in Quebec and there were two greek guys who made fun of me for not being able to pronounce 'sheep' (in English) properly.

It's not that hard. If I can speak standard English (alongside my standard Czech), so can you. Take an acting class already.

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