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Comment by themetrician | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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