How to Master an Accent
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
When people are learning how to draw, they typically have to learn how to "unsee". To quote Betty Edwards:
students beginning in art generally do not really see what is in front of their eyes — that is, they do not perceive in the way required for drawing. They take note of what's there, and quickly translate the perception into words and symbols mainly based on the symbol system developed throughout childhood and on what they know about the perceived object.
Learning how to pronounce sounds in a new language is the same. A lot of people will pronounce foreign words with how their brain thinks it should sound, using their native language as a baseline. The trick is to try to get rid of any phonetic preconception you might have, and pronounce sounds as you hear them from native speakers. It takes practice, but it's a learnable skill.
(Which is why romanization of Asian languages, for instance, is a trap for new learners: if you're learning Japanese, the latin alphabet should have no place whatsoever in your learning. It's a tempting, but false path)
For drawing like for speaking, kids are naturally good at this. (except while language acquisition happens naturally for kids, deliberate drawing practice rarely does)
English and French spelling is as far removed from each other as anything. Anybody learning a foreign language will have to come to terms with the fact that the letters work slightly-to-moderately different for each language, whether those are European or Asian languages. Danish and Swedish are practically dialects of each other, but the spelling and pronunciation are miles apart. Trying to read one with the usage of the other will sound as stilted as any transliteration of any "non-alphabet" language.
Alphabet is the only official way to type out pronunciation of mainland Chinese, so trying to avoid the alphabet for Chinese is basically impossible.
Vietnamese, like several other Asian languages is Alphabet with diatrics, so again, you have to use Alphabet. There is nothing magical about Asian languages that gets contaminated by the Alphabet.
As for Japanese, the kana alphabet can be transcribed to Alphabet without information loss, so it is in no way a poor substitute. You also have to learn romanisations in order to type on a keyboard.
The bottom line is, you have to learn new sounds when learning a new language and you have to learn new spelling. shi in Japanese or Chinese are quite close to English, at least compared to how close ta is to the English pronunciation of "shi", so the alphabet acts as a nice mnemonic structure for learners.
When learning French you don't have that opportunity so you're going to keep having to remind yourself that not a single character in a French word sounds like what it does on your native language.
I've seen this in action when learning Finnish, a long time ago, in a class full of expats. Most Germans had serious trouble with the ä, which sounds entirely different in Finnish than in German. They would consistently pronounce it like in German, which made them sound ridiculous. The rest of the class, whose native language alphabet didn't contain the ä, got their pronunciation much closer to the real thing. I can only imagine how powerful this is if not a single character, but the entire script, is different from your native language.
Every now and then I'll mess up when reading out loud a "c" ("ts" in Czech) if I'm not paying attention, or writing "ch" instead of "č" - but that's pretty rare.
It's not the letters that mess me up, but the "false friends" - words that look similar to some in English and that can be a pretty big deal. I'm gonna write something in weird pseudo-code, because I can't express it cleanly in English.
German.ja == English.yes
Czech.já == English.me
English.my == Czech.[moje,můj]*
Czech.my == English.we
English.no == Czech.ne
English.yes == Czech.ano (shortened to "no")
If it sounds like I'm complaining then I'm not - I love all this weirdness :)
* = actually reflection and cases make this more complicated still - could also be mého/mému/mém/mým/své/svého/svému/svém/svým depending on context
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pollution
"Recorded since the 1340s, as "discharge of semen other than during sex", later, "desecration, defilement" (1382), from Late Latin pollutio (“defilement”)"
Turns out that in Hungarian No/Not == Nem so when she translates it in her head she uses No/Not interchangeably and it's flip a coin on what comes out, I find it endearingly cute, "Did you remember the milk?" "Not!".
I still confuse her with "aye" as an affirmative yes (I'm from Yorkshire in England and we still use aye and to a lesser extent 'nay' as an emphatic no).
English integrated many words from other languages, incl French -- due to migration, conquests etc. English people had the tendency to retain the original spelling but to pronounce the foreign words english. It is interesting to compare this to Spanish where, in many cases, foreign words are spelled differently but most often the original pronunciation is approximately retained.
Chinese schoolchildren learn Pinyin before they learn Hanzi. Romanisation is only a problem if you're under the false assumption that these letters mean what you think they mean. It isn't hard to internalise the idea that j, x and q represent completely alien sounds that you must learn to recognise and reproduce.
Not quite true in reverse - lead and read, for example, would have the same kana but are different in english. That said, yeah I totally agree, there is nothing wrong with using the alphabet if you are mindful that there is a different phonetic 'mapping.'
There's actually a trick that, for me at least, makes this a lot easier. If I learn to speak English with a heavy accent of someone with a different native language, it will then be easier to transition into speaking that other language. It almost separates learning a new language from learning to pronounce that language.
The key is that it's a lot easier for me to hear and practice the sounds of a new language when I can hear the differences between my pronunciation and correct pronunciation and it's most easy to hear those differences in my native language. With enough practice on the accent, the rhythms, tongue positioning and overall mouth habits that the speaker I'm aping hasn't yet learned to drop become second nature such that when I transition over to speaking that other language, I already have correct habits.
As an English speaker, it's so easy to find YouTube clips of people who barely speak English to copy that I can learn to do a pretty convincing accent in an afternoon at this point, though it took take me a couple of days the first few times I tried it.
I don't really believe this. Spanish, French, English, and Swahili are all written in the same alphabet, but have wildly different pronunciations. There's nothing magical about using Roman letters (and I have a chip on my shoulder about this after studying Japanese because, while converting Japanese to a romanized system has actual sound arguments against it, "it would sound like English" is trotted out constantly even though it's nonsense).
I disagree entirely. ローマ字 is a terrible trap for beginners and it does affect their pronunciation. It is why so many people struggle with the Japanese "r" and つ. It is why people pronounce "せんぱい" incorrectly. Do you see it romanized as "senpai" or "sempai"? Both of those differ greatly for beginners. It is why they learn 言う incorrectly. It is always romanized "iu" though it is pronounced "yuu" and unless you are told or are listening to how natives say it, you will learn it wrong.
Should ようこ be romanized as "yoko", "youko", or "yōko"? Would you read any of these differently from one another? The answer should be "yes" because よこ is not equivalent to ようこ but in some romanizations you will see them be equivalent.
It's a big wake up call when you visit Japan and realize you're completely illiterate outside of English signs (if you are in 京都 or 東京). If you did not study Kana you will not be able to read anything. My first recommendation for learners is to learn Kana and completely abandon romanizations entirely.
E: Speaking of 東京. Is it romanized "Tokyo" or "Toukyou"? Which of these do you think most people, including learners, see it as? Can you see how they end up pronouncing it incorrectly because of how it is romanized?
Long and short vowels must obviously be distinguished. I think either yōko or yooko are fine. Either Tōkyō or Tookyoo will let a beginner pronounce the word correctly. Some prefer youko and it works fine in almost all cases too, but perhaps there's no real value in clinging to the accidental way with which hiragana happens to represent long vowels; it isn't inherent to the language. Besides, there's a small added benefit in disambiguating real [ou] pronunciations like omou.
Your point about visiting Japan is well-put. There's no arguing with the fact that anyone who wishes to understand Japanese should learn kana and kanji. But I think that there's a real value in putting emphasis on the spoken language first, and a well-developed minority tradition of teaching Japanese like this in a serious manner, not as a crutch. E.g. Eleanor Jorden's JSL textbook follows this principle, as do a number of other textbooks and guides.
"To get started in learning to read modern Japanese along the correct lines, it is essential that first of all you have some knowledge of the modern spoken language. This is so important that it is well to emphasize it strongly from the beginning - contrary to what you may think, you undoubtedly will not make the best progress in learning to read Japanese by starting in your study of the language directly with reading and writing in the Japanese script. Some previous work with spoken Japanese is essential, and the better your grasp of the patterns and the forms of the spoken language, the faster and surer will be your progress with the reading materials in this book" (Roy Andrew Miller, _A Japanese Reader_).
But that is not currently the case in the most popular romanization method (Hepburn). 日本式 is the "better way" for learners but Hepburn is used for foreigners and learners because of how prevalent it is.
The two largest grammar guides that I see shared in /r/learnjapanese, and on the internet in general, are imabi.net and Tae Kim's Guide to Learning Japanese. Both of which advocate studying Kana and abandoning ローマ字 ASAP. The first result for "learning japanese" is Tae Kim's guide and on one of the very first lessons it even opens with this comic [0].
I take the quote you quoted more as "Don't try to learn Japanese grammar by reading a Japanese grammar book" and less as "Don't try to learn Japanese grammar in English but explaining the fundamentals using Kana." It talks about all reading being in Kana/Kanji rather than just the important bits.
Unless your object is to learn writing, specifically, why is it important? It's like learning homophonous spellings in English -- it has no bearing whatever on the spoken language.
Tae Kim has put together a nice site but he's an amateur without much knowledge of linguistics.
I actually think this is because our opinions differ. I'm running under the assumption that "learning Japanese" involves all aspects, spoken and written. You're running under the assumption that "learning Japanese" involves only being able to speak the language.
You're correct. If someone's only goal is to learn to speak a language - then they don't need the writing system and can use romanizations with little issue. However, when (not if) they decide to learn the writing system they're shooting themselves in the foot and doing themselves a disservice. They may not decide to learn the written form for an entire decade, but if they ever live in a country where they need to use the language on a daily basis - the country isn't going to change all their signs to romanizations of the language just so they can find their way around town.
You've rather misconstrued what I'm saying. I object, specifically, to the idea that the writing system determines pronunciation. It's also less than clear (it is contentious among educators, at any rate) that learning the writing system first is the best way to learn Japanese -- although, hey it worked for me.
If you want to argue that you have to learn the writing system that Japanese people use to read and write Japanese and hope to have people understand you, well, of course that's true, but it's so blindingly obvious I don't know why you feel the need to argue about it.
> the country isn't going to change all their signs to romanizations of the language just so they can find their way around town.
Probably a bad example since you have to go pretty damn far afield before the signs aren't all also in the Roman alphabet.
Also, nobody says "x-go ga sittemasu" to mean "I know such-and-such a language."
No it isn't. It's because those sounds do not appear in the same positions in English. These arguments are both tired and completely ignorant.
If you were raised speaking english, then the roman letters of the english alphabet have distinct pronounciations/sounds to you. They make these sounds in your head when you read them. Someone born in mexico will have a different alphabet, and heck even australians and British people have different sounds for their letters than Americans. Heck even Americans from different regions have different sounds.
The point is that Thai people make different noises when they speak. They do not have an "z" sound. Frankly, none of their sounds match up exactly to any of our sounds. When you spell thai words using the english alphabet, you will then tend to read the word back as you have written it, in English, and thus incorrectly. Thai letters have Thai sounds, so you should learn this second alphabet and then you can read thai words by making the correct thai sounds.
If a language has an official transliteration system, such as pinyin for Chinese, then it may possibly work, but you are still essentially learning a second alphabet, merely one with the same shaped letters. For languages like Thai though, there is no official transliteration, and making your own and using it consistently would be more difficult than simply learning the Thai alphabet, and infact would more or less require learning the Thai alphabet.
For an extreme example, consider that African language that has the clicky sounds. How would you even begin to remember how a word sounds if you were storing it in your brain as text after transliterating it into the English alphabet? "Click clack click clack" is not the correct pronunciation.
Edit: I re-read your comment and see that you speak Japanese. You are using roman-looking letters, but you are surely being very careful to read the letters using Japanese sounds. Given that an alphabet is a set of letters that represent phonemes, are you really using the English alphabet or have you created a second, phonetic Japanese alphabet that happens to have identical shapes?
Why would this predisposition of seeing alphabet as connected to own sounds be worse with languages that don't use it natively?
If anything, English speakers have it easy - most English language has very loose connection between letters and sounds, i.e. most letters can be pronounced in wildly different ways depending on word or context. As such, English speakers should be used to constantly re-interpreting what a letter sequence sounds like - unlike those of us with phonetic language background, who are frankly constantly irked by English in this way ;)
When French people learn English, they often fall into the trap of pronouncing it in a French way: the way they read it instead of how they hear it. There are many elements in the accent of French speakers in English that come from this.
If you use romanisation of a language like Japanese, you expose yourself to the same problem instead of learning directly with the original script. In addition, the most common romanisation of Japanese is designed to be readable by European language speakers (Hepburn) rather than just using the roman alphabet in a logical, direct application of the native script (Kunrei).
> When French people learn English, they often fall into the trap of pronouncing it in a French way: the way they read it instead of how they hear it.
People learning any foreign language often "fall into the trap" of pronouncing it using phonemes and intonation that are more appropriate for their native languages and I sat through enough reading aloud sessions in college to assure you that somebody reading in the native script can still speak in an awful accent.
I would like to hear your arguments against romanization if you feel up for it.
This sounds plausible and I want it to be true but I have doubts that every phoneme of every world language can be discriminated by adults after the early-childhood language acquisition. (The so-called "critical period."[1]).
I think a fascinating example even within one language such as English is the "pin" vs "pen" pronunciation.[2]
And plenty of other 2nd-language learning examples such as English speakers missing the delicate "zh" sound in French "bonjour" and always pronouncing it with the hard "j" -- or trying to pronounce the Vietnamese "Nguyen" as "when" or "win". There's a (tonal) phoneme in Vietnamese that's nonexistent in English so it's very possible English listeners can't even hear it as a new distinct sound they have to replicate. The "when" or "win" is the closest approximation they will ever hear and because of that, they will always sound non-native.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period#Second_languag...
[2]https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/14y6tc/til_m...
"In Alabama, both are pronounced "pee-uhn." People made fun of me when I first moved here for pronouncing pen as "pehn" and pin as, well "pin."
hawklawson: "Can I borrow a pehn?"
people: "Hahaha you need a 'pun'? Say it agin..."
And, to this day, when I'm scheduling appointments for patients over the phone...
hawklawson: "I have an opening for tehn o'clock."
people: "Huh? Whee-uhn j'you say?"
hawklawson: "I have an opening for tee-uhn a'clawk."
people: "Alrighty then put 'er down."
Source: I can turn my southern accent on and off."
And living for more than a decade in the country that simply can't produce some sounds of my mother's tongue, I catch myself having more problems voicing them. I know the difference but it's somehow harder, without the environment and the context. Somehow the tongue becomes almost numb to move like before.
It's almost trivial if you're trained to listen rather than decode. Opera singers can achieve perfect pronunciation of languages they don't comprehend at all, through the use of IPA. The words are absolutely meaningless to them, they're just very precisely recreating a certain set of sounds. Their musical listening skills transfer directly into pronunciation.
If you can learn to sing Sygyt as an adult, I think you can cope with a couple of tricky phonemes in a foreign language.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_14pb2i6Sc
Like OP, I think that the comparison with visual art is very apt. Most people see on a functional level, identifying objects rather than seeing their literal forms. As a result, they tend to draw the abstract idea of a thing rather than the literal appearance of a thing. Learning to draw involves unlearning that windows are rectangular, that chairs have legs of equal length, that a soccer ball is spherical.
If we're primed to pay attention to one thing, it vastly diminishes our ability to recognise other things:
But the question is why you would want to do that? No human can speak all the world's languages, or realistically more than a few languages. This article is about a woman who is performing only in English.
It is certainly true that non-native speakers can learn a language quite well, after years of immersion and studied effort. Personally I don't think it's impossible for language learners to achieve native-level competence; I just think the number of people who achieve higher levels of competence decreases exponentially.
Based on my own experience of emigrating to a country using a different language than my native tongue, I think it can be done over time, but my understanding is that we use a different part of the brain for languages learned late in life.
I think this likely also works for perfect pitch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Cb1qwCUvI.
Neuroplasticity is very different for kids, but there are probably techniques that can enable learning like this with adults - just takes longer.
That said, if one doesn't want to take drawing seriously and just want to have fun (See conflicting Amazon reviews on Betty's book), Betty's book perhaps is entertaining. I just have a problem with its popularity and will probably lead people into delusion that somehow they have managed to conquer the drawing. Drawing is hard.
I also lose respect for authors that despite of knowing nothing about the field or making any attempts to study/understand, they have the audacity to publish their own version of "how the brain works". It bothers me.
It sets a common ground for you to work with. There may be some vowels that may be undistinguishable for both native speakers. However, you'll likely to come across some that requires a developed ear to differentiate the two. This is the reason why you probably have an accent. Focus on tongue placement, emphasis, change in pitch, etc.
Of course, this won't help much to actually speak in a different language, but for accents I found this method incredibly helpful. It's the micro side of things that most people overlook.
"What Languages Sound Like To Foreigners" https://youtu.be/ybcvlxivscw
French and Spanish: I've heard them around but never spoken them. She sounded perfect.
Swedish: I used to be able to speak it but have forgotten. She sounded even more convincing than in French.
Japanese: I speak it now but not natively. She sounded pretty rough and not all that Japanese to me.
English: My native language. My brain tried so hard to make sense of it and pulled out snippets of words but there was no grammar there.
In her next video, she completely nailed the (female version of the) Australian English. Really had to laugh out loud at how she captured that essence. Genius.
Edit: It's certainly not the only one, all Australian females don't sound like this; it's just that she got this particular version of the Australian ones so right. I'm actually somewhat confused as to how to place it; back home you'd have the geographical regions and that's it. So I wonder if this Australian one is more of a "sociolect". If anyone has any info / pointers I'd love to learn more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variation_in_Australian_Englis... #Sociocultural_variation
Similar maybe to the "valley girl" American accent. Once perhaps a California only thing, now something you hear from teenage girls/women in their 20s all around the US (probably due to Hollywood, in part).
English: (my second, dominant language) See above.
And for languages with which I only have a passing familiarity...
Swedish, Estonian, French: Pretty convincing.
Portuguese: A bit off the mark. Sounded almost like Italian.
Japanese: Only sort-of convincing.
Spanish (Castilian): Her stress placement seemed a little off but most of the vowels were good. Sort of an Americanized version.
That was the point.
For fun I tried to transcribe it.
----
Asså de e ju man svarta man handlar jua
Filen man råd ostaglig kämpare
Me de sju mat trämpar me alla pluva som fan
Dessa fjortare plådar oss mot en botande mas hemma
---
In a somewhat related sort of humour, as a Swedish-speaker you might enjoy this piece of gibberish:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5DCnSlWOc8
(It's the genuine Soviet anthem in Russian, with Swedish subtitles that will sound similar when you sing them out, and the hallucinatory Swedish sentences are then demonstrated in video. I just love it, though I don't know the guy who did this.)
And yeah I know it is gibberish. But she used so many real words I wanted to write the sentences down as well as I could.
The video I've seen before loads of times, and yeah it's pretty funny how it works out.
As an English speaker with a bit of German, that's how Dutch sounds to me: it sounds like English, only wrong somehow. I feel that if I just focused a bit harder, or they'd enunciate more clearly, I'd understand it.
Hooray for languages!
It still sounds a little bit Italian...
Funny thing: at the end she said "a huevo cabron" which is a Mexican expression but she was using a different accent.
The Humble Brothers produced most of the Simlish tracks in the mid 00s and have an album of their impressive songs available on iTunes. "Upside" is a fine example.[1]
[0] https://www.cnet.com/news/simlish-singing-the-music-behind-t...
She just crammed the Semitic sounds in a few made up words sparkled by some real Arabic words and that's it but she should have been making more effort in imitating the rhythm and intonation (prosody) [1] to fool the native Arabic speaker ears that what she speaks was actually Arabic.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_%28linguistics%29
...and note that she's genuinely fluent in only 3 of those!
https://www.ted.com/talks/sarah_jones_as_a_one_woman_global_...
They're only about $12 (per language) on his web site here: https://fluent-forever.com/product/fluent-forever-pronunciat...
This drove me nuts when I was learning: https://toshuo.com/2010/the-hardest-thing-about-taiwanese-ph...
I agree. To add: The most useful advice I read, which I found useful, is stop caring about tones of individual words. Listen to the flow of sentences, correct own pronunciation of words that are wrong with some drilling, and focus on communication. Like English, speaking word-by-word (or, character-by-character) doesn't sound natural.
And also stop caring if you're met with an unfamiliar word. As long as you're focused on the sentence, it should be pretty obvious if it is a noun, verb, pronoun, or any other part of speech. Does it have material impact? If so, take a note and remember it.
Basically, stop translating what one hears. Just understand it.
For improving pronunciation, it's much more useful to pick a short passage that includes pretty much the full phonetic set of the language and drill it repeatedly. In years past, famous hyper-polyglots in Europe tended to use The Lord's Prayer for this. Now, there are a lot more options and you can also record yourself reading the passage and listen and compare your own sound with a native recording. Spend half an hour a day doing this for a month and it will have a dramatic effect on your pronunciation and accent in the target language. At least it has with every single person I've seen who has had the discipline to do it.
Lords prayer as something to read does not fit well for Chinese. Chinese cannot sanely be read using pinyin. Chinese must be read by characters. I guess you know this, as your username is xiaoma.
Speaking and listening doesn't need remembering a lot of what are to early learners, symbols, and to later learners a collection of particles that sometimes make cute sense but are more often a sense of time waste and pain.
Learning characters one-by-one however makes no sense. Unless on wants to sound like a CCTV1 7pm news announcer reading a script, words need to be put in to context, and for that is the need to relax, and just say things as they're said.
In essence, bypass hearing the difference (that comes later, through use) and skip straight to making the sounds.
Probably works better for unfamiliar phonemes than tones, though. Different issues entirely.
I moved to Finland and couldn't differentiate between ö and o for the longest time. But after living here for a year it became easier.
> “For me it’s not an accent. I know people who do brilliant accents. But I don’t know how to do that.”
I wonder if there are any people who market homeopathy targeted at vocal training. How would that even work (I mean, in terms of similia similibus curentur or whatever)?
* Record own voice speaking passages of above material
* Play back, compare, adjust and repeat
Do above for countless hours
People always use colin Farrell as an example of adults who mastered an accent but forget that his native language is phonetically close to the language he is supposedly mastering.
Funniest one I've seen in a while.