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Comment by ojosilva | Hacker News Reader

Many comments here get fluency and the lack of an accent (pronunciation) mixed up. Although pronounciation and general entonation is part of being fluent in a language, the message is still the most important factor in fluency and the only one being evaluated by the quiz in the study.

For instance, many people who are native English speakers have terrible accents (ie Texan, Scouse, Scottish, etc etc) that make it hard for other native English speakers to understand, even though they're nearly 100% "fluent English speakers". In fact this applies to many if not all languages.

As a curiosity, two of the most lyric works of literature ever written in the English language - Lolita and Heart of Darkness - were written by Vladmir Nabokov and Joseph Conrad, one Russian and the other a Polish immigrant to the US that had terrible foreign English accents.

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Fluency is a matter of comprehension just as much as production. English is a global language spoken with a wide range of accents. Users of English who can only understand a narrow range of accents (Americans, I'm looking at you!) simply lack fluency in anything other than their local dialect.

>Users of English who can only understand a narrow range of accents (Americans, I'm looking at you!)

Is this based on your anecdotal observations, or is this opinion based on something concrete? Because as an American who knows many other Americans, my anecdotal experience is that we can understand English accents from people all over the world.

This of course varies from person to person, but software engineers I've worked with are accustomed to speaking with people with accents.

> Is this based on your anecdotal observations, or is this opinion based on something concrete?

Not every semi-flippant comment has to be a bloody double-blind epidemiological study. Get a grip, man! Go and have a beer.

Then why make the comment? This isn't Reddit

I think there might be an ever so tiny sliver of space between every bracketed jocular aside needing a reference to a peer-reviewed double-blinded study, and falling into redditland. Intellectual rigour applied wisely is clearly a virtue. Inquisitorial nit-picking humourlessness however is just a bore.

It was a peculiar aside - you shouldn't be surprised that you were asked about it.

I have seen an Italian interpreting between a Georgian (US) and a Scot (probably Glaswegian) with all speaking English.

I'm from Georgia, USA, living in Singapore, and I regularly translate English-to-English among colleagues who are Chinese, Indian, Filipino, Thai, Aussie, American, British, etc. I think exposure to many English accents and dialects certainly helps regional comprehension even though it's the same language.

That depends entirely on what accents you have been exposed to.

My favorite English accent is African.

> the lack of an accent

Everybody who speaks has an accent.

> many people who are native English speakers have terrible accents (ie Texan, Scouse, Scottish, etc etc)

In your opinion. How good or bad a native speaker accent is is entirely subjective. If you have trouble understanding Texans, Liverpudlians, or Scots, that's your problem, not theirs.

I'd also cut foreigners who master English, especially English language novelists, some slack.

It's definitely their problem if more people who speak English don't understand them than do.

Kafka, a Czech, wrote in German.

The Czech Republic borders on Germany, and even though the number of German speakers in Czechia has been declining, about 20% of Czechs still speak some German. In Kafka's time many places in Czechia still had Czech as well as German names.

On top of that his parents spoke primarily German.

Here's what Wikipedia has to say about his upringing:

> His family were German-speaking middle-class Ashkenazi Jews. [...] Kafka's parents probably spoke a German influenced by Yiddish that was sometimes pejoratively called Mauscheldeutsch, but, as the German language was considered the vehicle of social mobility, they probably encouraged their children to speak Standard German.

Also all the schools he attended taught in German. That is elementary school, Gymnasium (secondary school), and the university he attended.

It's really not comparable to authors writing in a language that is not "native" to them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka#Life

He most likely learned it as a child as he grew up in the Austrian Empire.

In another comment I point out that I consider (due to experience) the idea that adults cannot become fluent a myth -- I'm merely pointing out that Kafka is likely not an example. Conrad is a much better example: a pole who leant English as an adult and published exclusively in it. For a Czech, consider Milan Kundera (French); Beckett is another example of a writer in French, a language he learnt as an adult.

Kafka was a Jewish subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, living in what he would have called Bohemia and regarded as a province. I have no idea whether he spoke Czech but I’d be astonished if his grandparents weren’t primarily Yiddish speakers. At his death he had been a citizen of Czechoslovakia for only six years, and German speakers were 1/4-1/3 of the Czechoslovak population.

> Kafka, a Czech, wrote in German.

Albert Camus, an Algerian, wrote in French.

Seamus Heaney, an Irishman, wrote in English.

Nabokov didn't have a horrible accent. To me it sounds extremely British and nothing else.

https://youtu.be/Ldpj_5JNFoA?t=47

It's quite an interesting accent, definitely not British, more Mid-atlantic but you still get the east European burr.

Nabokov spoke with a pleasant accent to my ears (and brilliantly of course), but no-one from the UK would think for a millisecond it was native.

No, but what I was saying was that within my context as a native English speaker, his accent is within the realm of possibilities.

His accent is Slavic, but a very slight one. I struggle with the same sounds.

> entonation

intonation

Nabokov was a native speaker of English, with an English nanny and governess. Conrad, a contrario, learned English as an adult.

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