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Comment by rvense | Hacker News Reader

This is utter rubbish. Nobody learns to speak any language as an adult without an accent. That has nothing to do with phonological complexity, that's just how we're wired. Spanish may be easy to describe on a blackboard, but don't tell me that people who learn Spanish as a second language later on don't have accents.

And languages don't succeed because of linguistics, they succeed because of politics. As someone whose native language is being replaced by it, I know that English is a perfect example of this.

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> Nobody learns to speak any language as an adult without an accent.

Probably true, but not because of the vowels, but because of rhythms and consonants for languages other than english. Particularly vowels are divisive, and to take spanish as an example, consider this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5nGUb6DarQ

Watch it with your mouse cursor off, and read the spanish bits, then sound them out, then check whether you got it right. (If you know spanish, find someone who doesn't.)

As an english person, you'll get a lot of them wrong. However most people from the european mainland will get most of them right, especially germans like me. Barring the ll sound, and the rhythms, spanish sounds very close to how a german would read it.

Yes, there will be accents, but nothing as strong as you get with a european mainlander speaking english.

And that is entirely because english vowels are a mess that can only be conquered by memorization.

Well, strictly speaking everyone has an accent, including native speakers. But being able to pass for a native is perfectly possible; in fact my brother can do it in France, a country that is famous for spotting foreigners a mile off.

How did he do it? He spent several years there and really worked at it (he can also do a convincing range of British accents). His one regret is that he nailed it in a somewhat bucolic part of France, so the cool Parisiennes just assume he's a paysan.

Is it harder? Yes. Impossible? Far from it. Although I'll bet you elocution lessons would help (my brother hasn't done any).

I used to know a woman who learned French in Belgium (her husband was career military, and they were there for quite a long time). When she visited France, they all assumed she was Belgian.

I agree as a Hungarian who speaks English and German. German pronunciation was much easier to learn and not just because of the writing system. Simply the whole phonology is closer (except for the German throat-R, we roll our Rs in Hungarian).

English has this weird flow to it, this kind of liquidlike smeared sound. And the intonation and stress is also very alien.

It's also usually easier for a beginner to understand another beginner from a different country, than a native speaker pronouncing the same (simple) sentences.

  >  Nobody learns to speak any language as an adult without an accent.

Nobody speaks any language without an accent. However, I've managed to convince native Spanish speakers that I was from Spain (later I had trouble convincing them that Spanish was my second language).

Most people don't get rid of their foreign sounding accent because they don't work on improving their accent.

I find it super difficult to find the tools to do that. There are no courses for it no books, and people don't tell you that you're pronouncing something wrong because they think it would be unpolite.

I'd love to hear some tips on how to work on improving my accent. I moved to Sweden 10 years ago and Swedish is my 4th language.

In Spanish culture correcting someone miss-pronunciation is quite common. It's one of the reasons why it can be quicker to master the language by immersion that in an ultra-polite society found in English speaking languages.

The best way to work on your accent is to record yourself and listen to it. Ideally you would have a native say it in a native manner. Movies, TV shows, and particularly audiobooks (with the printed copy) can be a great sources to work on it.

I have encouraged my co-workers to correct my English lately (12 years in Australia). They've been teaching me some of the local sayings, and correcting my pronunciation etc... Things that in Spain would have been picked up and addressed much sooner.

Recording myself is an interesting idea, I will try that.

I also told all my coworkers to correct me but of the 10 people I cpeak to often only one does, for which I am super thankfull.

The first tip is to learn to listen to yourself. If someone ever corrects you, that is gold.

1) Focus on the vowels. They will help you get the resonance right (the resonance is how you hold the muscles in your mouth, so the sound seems to come from the back of your throat like in Russian or the front of your mouth like in Korean)

2) Focus on the rhythm of the language. I'm sure you know what I mean here.

3) Focus on the intonation: what pitches do they have? Scottish has kind of a lilt, for example.

4) Try to notice "phonemes", and I put it in quotes to expand the idea to mean "what native speakers consider important". For example, Mandarin speakers can't hear a vowel change to save their life, but if you get the intonation slightly wrong they glare at you.

5) Focus on details, listen to how letters change when they are between other letters, etc. (Watching to how people respond to your speech can be helpful, especially if they don't understand. Small words especially. For example, a listener might get confused and not understand the world "Lip", even though they would understand "Literally", if your "L" is slightly off)

6) Don't underestimate the value of correct grammar in improving your accent.

Incidentally, I learned of the existence of this as formal theory from David Stern (although his focus is on stage accents which is a little different)

Also, if you have any tips I'd love to hear them too :)

One thing that helped me avoid a German accent while speaking English, was to imitate a heavy German accent and observe what was really the essence of it, then just avoiding these "mistakes".

For example, here are the things that make up most of the German accent of English:

- pronouncing "th" as "s" (Germans apparently don't know how to put one's tongue tip on the upper teeth)

- pronouncing "w" as "v" (like the German "w") instead of as "u"

- sharper pronounciation of initial vowels (i.e. when a word starts with a vowel) and "h"

good tips

Yeah, I guess the only tip I have is to make a concious decission to want to improve on that, that at least is the first important step as far as I can see.

I'll try to integrate some of the things you point out into my daily life, we'll see how it goes :D

Good luck! I'd love to hear how it turns out (in a year or two? lol)

Thinking about it some more, I think it is essential to get the resonance right. And when you do get it right, it fixes a million other small problems along with it.

Focusing hard on the vowels is the easiest way I know to get the resonance

"Most people don't get rid of their foreign sounding accent because they don't work on improving their accent."

Taking on enough of a local accent to be understood is good. Losing your accent is a terrible cost that requires hard work to achieve. Why would you work hard to hurt yourself?

After all, chicks dig an accent.

I know a few people who started learning Spanish as an adult (20+) and developed a perfect accent after a couple of years of speaking Spanish only. It's not common, but it is possible. What I find funny about English is that even native speakers don't know (or agree) how to pronounce some words :)

That is because there is no official English.

At least the UN considers the British spelling as the official one:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_languages_of_the_Unit...

But for a tiny, well connected island Britain has a remarkable diversity in pronunciation.

Even speakers of "RP", a supposedly region-neutral "educated" accent which is as close to "official" British English as we've ever had permits variations in pronunciation so marked that speakers of one variant can find speakers of other variants' pronunciation of a particular word comical.

British spelling is not the British accent. One estimate had the English accent changing about every 25 miles as you travel through Britain.

Have you seen Hot Fuzz? In it, the police visit a farmer with a strong West Country accent, and take an interpreter with them. All parties are speaking English in the scene, but the farmer's words are so strongly accented, the interpreter has to translate. That scene was based on a direct observation that the writers made while researching the film...

I would expect that to have gone away to some degree with the rise of movies, radio, and television. Certainly it did in the United States. We still do have regional accents, of course, but I remember seeing a farmer from Appalachia on television getting subtitles when I was a kid. I doubt that ever happens today.

Still happens in the Netherlands, which is of course far smaller still. People switch from their local dialect to standard Dutch on TV, but still have accents that confuse city people or those living on the other side of the country.

I sometimes see American TV stations subtitle American-dialect speakers. Mostly this is due to audio quality, but it happens frequently enough with urban speakers of African American Vernacular English.

Standard English on television probably certainly helps speakers of less-prestigious lects understand Standard English, but not necessarily inspires them to produce it.

Oh, stewardess. I speak Jive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0j2dVuhr6s

The UN also says North Korea isn't allowed to have nukes. Look how well that turned out...

The UN has no real authority on anything.

It might be worth noting that the author is English. The English have a very peculiar relationship with accent, in that one's accent is one of the prime indicators of social class in their country.

As such the author may be unknowingly over-emphasizing the role of distinct vowel pronunciations, assigning their importance to intelligibility or understanding rather than merely to accent.

In english words change meaning just by slightly changing accent.

Ship, sheep buy, by sheet, shit

Also english doesn't (compared to italian) is filled with exceptions.

Many people are going to pronounce "buy", "by", and "bye" exactly the same way. The only way to tell the difference would be from how the word is used in a sentence.

Wiktionary lists bi, buy, and by as homophones to bye

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bye

IPA: /baɪ/

The difference between 'ship' and 'sheep' and 'sheet' and 'shit' is the difference between a tense and a lax vowel. Italian doesn't make use of this distinction, so it's hard for Italians to hear the difference, but it's a perfectly ordinary distinction in vowel quality used in many languages.

There is no difference at all in the pronunciation of 'buy' and 'by'.

This also varies between English accents. Many American-English accents will pronounce "Mary", "merry", and "marry" the same, but in British-English they all sound different.

I don't think that it's a matter of accent. I cannot speak for Spanish, but adult Italian learners do have an accent, but being that in general written Italian is pretty much phonetic and we only have 7 distinct vowel sounds however you mangle it you can probably approximate it well enough to be understood.

Some things are really hard in Italian like the GL in aglio (garlic), but for example most Romans tend to turn it into a semiconsonant (like the first i in ieri). So basically you'll be understood.

Contrast that with French, that is also mostly phonetic but has a lot more vowels (around 17), that is also a language that is usually much harder to learn to speak as an adult (but it's not so bad if you just want to read. And maybe that is why everybody has this stereotype of the rude Parisian that never tries to understand a foreigner speaking French (though there might be more to the rudeness of Parisians).

You're wrong. I learned to speak French at age 17 with no accent. That counts as "adult" by any meaningful metric.

Edit: By "no accent" I of course mean "indistinguishable from a native French speaker". Everyone has an accent so technically "no accent" is meaningless.

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