Hacker News Reader

Comment by jtemplestein | Hacker News Reader

I'm originally from Germany and moved to San Francisco three years ago, when I was 21. People are often surprised that I don't have a strong German accent and I jokingly say that it's because I watched all 10 seasons of Friends a few times in a row. It's a joke, but I'm convinced it has a lot to do with it.

There's an interview with Max Levchin somewhere in which he says that he watched some TV show over and over and repeated everything that was said in order to rebrand himself as a midwesterner after he moved to the US. His English is really good, too.

View on HN

Oh if only watching tv was enough to get rid of the accent! As a dane, my accent at its worst sounds like someone making fun of a deaf person

Same here as a french guy. Even worse is that I can usually hide it pretty well (or at least diminish it) until I have to pronounce the letter 'R'. Damn R's...

What would be the equivalent french show for going the other way? I found Braquo on Hulu and started watching/translating/studying it, but realized pretty quickly that most of what they say should not be said in good company.

Try "Un gar une fille", it deals with typical, every day situations so it's good for vocabulary. Unfortunately, it may not be suitable for beginners. The conversations are fast paced and I haven't been able to find any French subtitles for it.

The problem is reversed for those of us learning French. Tough pronouncing the 'err' :)

I think it is dependent on which accent you have. In my experience as an american (who has met a lot of foreigners), I have found that germans and the dutch seem to have the least problem with the american accent. (Australians too, for a non-european example). There can be a number of reasons for this to be the case, but this is what I have noticed.

Why would you want to lose your accent? Accents make people sound more interesting

I learned English by watching Friends as well. However the thick german accent stayed. It's funny to see how many people in this post have learned english by watching Friends.

I work in language learning, and I whenever I meet someone that has successfully deaccented, they always tell the same story of how they did it. Listening to the same thing over and over. Watching a bunch of Friends won't work. You have to watch the same episode over and over. Find a piece of content and keep watching it until you have memorized what they say, and only then you will start hearing the sounds rather than the words and meaning.

I am not saying you should do this, but if you want to de-accent, then my sample size of about 7 suggests there is one way to do it.

I don't know if it's so hard for most people to de-accent, if they want to. All you have to do is to be able to make all the sounds that are in regular English - for me I was missing -th (ð) sound - and make an effort to pronounce everything correctly. I've always had a knack for imitating people, and it's never been hard for me to imitate any accent or dialect (of my own language or English) as long I've had enough exposure to it. So if I want to adapt a new accent, it's more a question of imitating it until I do it organically - faking it till I make it.

Of course, what is it like to have no accent? All of these people are mentioning Friends, in which they have a "standard" American accent, which says something about American-centric view of the whole debate. I've heard that I don't have an accent (from someone who wasn't American), though I don't know if he meant that I had a vanilla American accent or that I simply didn't have any accent that could be pinpointed.

Yes, it is so hard. I am learning Hindi and I can't even hear the difference between several of the consonants, making it very difficult to measure how well I'm pronouncing them. My Chicago friends can't hear the difference when I say Kyle and Karl, so can't teach themselves to imitate it. And even if they could, changing pronunciation habits takes a lot of attention to the way you speak, which takes effort, which is basically the definition of hard. Its nice that its easy for you, but you should try thinking of it as a skill you have rather than sound like you think everyone else is just lazy.

I didn't mean to say that everyone else is lazy - I just thought that having a native accent wasn't a priority for most people. People can usually make themselves understood perfectly as long as their accent isn't too deviant, and having an accent has its own charm :)

Different English accents have a massive variety of vowel and consonant sounds, and usually one can find a "difficult" vowel sound in some English accent. As a counter-example, in my experience Spanish accents have very little vowel sound variation.

Perhaps learning how to mimic accents of people from different regions (Irish, Jordie, Scottish, Alabama, BBC etc etc) of your own mother tongue gives you opportunity to learn how to hear and say different vowels and consonants from another language. Or practice the accent off non-native speakers e.g. a French accent for a Parisian speaking English.

> "what is it like to have no accent?"

This might be better phrased as a "native accent" for the region you're in. It's another way of saying that others can't pick out anything in the way you speak that identifies you as from somewhere else.

I had a Danish friend at University and she asked me how good her English was. I told her it was perfect, but she would never be taken for someone British as there was no sense of "place" or "class" with her accent.

You can normally make assumptions about someone's place or class within a few words or phrases in the UK

EG "fillum" for "film" for people from the North East, "supper" instead of "dinner" for middle/upper class people.

But if someone copies that behaviour would they get the same benefits?

Some correlated traits: * mimicking. A critical skill, which is poorly encouraged as a general skill, and as adults we often have habits or beliefs that interfere with it. * perseverance and repetition * exploring/using different ways of learning and working out what are effective means of learning and ignoring invalid common techniques. * Avoiding book learning and rule based learning.

My belief is: look at how a baby or child manages to do it, try to do what they do, and avoid using any parts of the brain they don't use when learning. Not to say I am fluent in another language, just to say what I see in successful second language speakers, and how I try to begin learning (I mostly lack perseverance and repetition!)

When I moved to the states at age 15, I came from a very prestigious English language school from my native country. As a result my written English was excellent, but nobody could understand my accent and I could not understand the American (or, more precisely, Californian) accent either.

It was "Married with Children" with closed captioning on that taught me how to actually speak American English. It took me a while to figure out what a "hooter" is and why Bud Bundy would want to pretend to be a FIDE ranked Grandmaster without earning that title, but it was all very educational.

In Once You're Lucky. Twice You're Good by Sarah Lacy, she humorously recounts Max Levchin learning English from TV:

He’d worked so hard to be perfect—what could he possibly have done wrong? It wasn’t a feeling he was used to.

“Where did you learn English?” the teacher asked.

Max responded: “Watchu talkin’ ‘bout, Mr. Harris?”

Mr. Harris kindly suggested he switch from Different Strokes reruns to the nightly news. Embarrassed but undeterred, Max did, and his near-flawless English steadily improved.

"Where did you learn English?"

"College. And the Police Academy movies."

Did it watching cartoons when I was younger...

It was a Wayne's World joke.

A woman serving in a bread shop in Cataluña thought I was retarded, ...but a native retard -- so that was pretty impressive considering I had only learned Spanish for 6 months.

"serving in a bread shop" = baker? Or at least "a woman serving in a bakery" :P

If the bread is made off site and all they do is sell the bread, can you still call it a bakery?

As an Englishman, I think it's sad that when non-native English speakers learn the language they target an American accent.

It's a sign of our times. Indian English follows more or less the British pattern (colour instead of color etc.). However, recent times have seen a marked shift towards American spellings and pronunciation. I would imagine this is the case in other former British colonies as well.

As long as they keep reading P.G. Wodehouse...

It's because of cultural influences such as Hollywood.

Oh, I understand why it is, but it doesn't stop me complaining :-)

I'm starting to feel some sympathy with the Academie Francaise [1]. At least the US English <--> British English traffic in terms of idioms isn't all one way [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_fran%C3%A7aise

[2] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-19929249

That is precisely how I have learned English when I moved from Poland to the UK. Friends and other TV shows together with English subtitles is the best way to learn.

I would love to see this provide the ability to learn other languages, for which subtitles might be hard to find.

I'd like Japanese subtitles for Japanese movies. Maybe that way I'd learn to read too.

I did, and still do the same thing. I can't even recall how many times I watched friends, entourage or deadwood. (I'm a Kraut, too, by the way). It helps massively, especially with slang. I want to do the same thing now for spanish.

Edit: Oh, and I still watch everything with captions, in case I missed something or there are words I didn't know.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com