| Pages in topic: < [1 2 3 4 5] | "you have an accent" Thread poster: Matthew Trulandzev
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| Children learning their mother tongue in a foreign country | Mar 9, 2014 |
I accept that after speaking Spanish for 37 years I haven't managed to completely get rid of my British accent (which I have been told is mixed up with a Catalan accent). That follows because I live in Catalonia.
What I can't understand is why both my daughters (born and living in Spain) and my sister's daughters (born and living in France) speak English with their respective 'father tongue' accents. When they were small, they only ever heard English being spoken by a British native... See more I accept that after speaking Spanish for 37 years I haven't managed to completely get rid of my British accent (which I have been told is mixed up with a Catalan accent). That follows because I live in Catalonia.
What I can't understand is why both my daughters (born and living in Spain) and my sister's daughters (born and living in France) speak English with their respective 'father tongue' accents. When they were small, they only ever heard English being spoken by a British native, so why didn't they learn to speak English like one?
Actually, this is a question my mother asked me years ago whilst she was visiting me in Spain; needless to say, I couldn't answer her ▲ Collapse
| | | | | Young minds react swiftly | Mar 9, 2014 |
Helena Chavarria wrote: What I can't understand is why both my daughters (born and living in Spain) and my sister's daughters (born and living in France) speak English with their respective 'father tongue' accents. When they were small, they only ever heard English being spoken by a British native, so why didn't they learn to speak English like one? Actually, this is a question my mother asked me years ago whilst she was visiting me in Spain; needless to say, I couldn't answer her
When did they start speaking French/Spanish and how much English versus French/Spanish did they speak/hear from that point on? It seems that their Romance languages are the dominant languages because they are truly immersed in them.
I think it has to do with hearing/speaking their fathers' languages pretty early (I assume when they started school), and the lack of exposure - or the relatively rare exposure - to authentic British English caused the foreign accents since young minds are very "flexible" and react swiftly to changing circumstances. It's just a theory.
But if they would go spend time in a British English environment, fully immersed, they might be able to learn to speak truly British English or at least lose most of their Romance accents present in their English now (I take it they are still in their teens).
B
[Edited at 2014-03-09 23:35 GMT]
| | | | | According to David Crystal emotions bring out mother tongues | Mar 9, 2014 |
Tom in London wrote:
I'm still secretly looking up basic grammatical questions. And when I lose my temper (which in Italy is not difficult to do) my "convincing" pronunciation tends to slip!
I'm afraid I do that in English. I get my prepositions mixed up.
As regards displaying emotions, I quite agree with you. Whenever I'm nervous or angry, even I can hear my accent.
| | | | Giles Watson 
Italy
Local time: 11:37
Italian to English
In memoriam | Musical learners | Mar 10, 2014 |
Bernhard Sulzer wrote:
Not sure I agree with your first 5 years window. I am sure there are many who have learned a second language in their teens and are indistinguishable from other native speakers.
They were probably musically gifted.
What you can't acquire after the age of about five is the "hardwiring" - the way you instinctively analyse and express meaning - that goes with a truly native tongue. It's not just a matter of when you learn your languages; the order in which you learn them also matters.
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| You've got to acquire the language very early to be a native speaker | Mar 10, 2014 |
Giles Watson wrote: Bernhard Sulzer wrote:
Not sure I agree with your first 5 years window. I am sure there are many who have learned a second language in their teens and are indistinguishable from other native speakers.
They were probably musically gifted. What you can't acquire after the age of about five is the "hardwiring" - the way you instinctively analyse and express meaning - that goes with a truly native tongue. It's not just a matter of when you learn your languages; the order in which you learn them also matters.
I agree with the hardwiring theory. This formation of our native language is going on during the first few months and years of our lives. The later you learn a language, the less likely it is that you can call yourself a native speaker of that language.
Also see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_learning
Language acquisition has been studied from the perspective of developmental psychology and neuroscience,[46] which looks at learning to use and understand language parallel to a child's brain development. It has been determined, through empirical research on developmentally normal children, as well as through some extreme cases of language deprivation, that there is a "sensitive period" of language acquisition in which human infants have the ability to learn any language. Several findings have observed that from birth until the age of six months, infants can discriminate the phonetic contrasts of all languages. Researchers believe that this gives infants the ability to acquire the language spoken around them. After this age the child is only able to perceive the phonemes specific to the language he or she is learning. This reduced phonemic sensitivity enables children to build phonemic categories and recognize stress patterns and sound combinations specific to the language they are acquiring.[47] As Christophe Pallier noted, "Before the child begins to speak and to perceive, the uncommitted cortex is a blank slate on which nothing has been written. In the ensuing years much is written, and the writing is normally never erased. After the age of ten or twelve, the general functional connexions have been established and fixed for the speech cortex." According to the sensitive or critical period models, the age at which a child acquires the ability to use language is a predictor of how well he or she is ultimately able to use language.[48]
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Did you participate in our epic thread about verification of native language claims?
See:
http://www.proz.com/forum/prozcom_suggestions/227485-should_“native_language”_claims_be_verified.html
[Edited at 2014-03-10 15:24 GMT]
| | | | Giles Watson
Italy
Local time: 11:37
Italian to English
In memoriam | Neil Coffey
United Kingdom
Local time: 10:37
French to English
+ ...
| Acquisition isn't necessarily so well partitioned | Mar 10, 2014 |
Helena Chavarria wrote:
What I can't understand is why both my daughters (born and living in Spain) and my sister's daughters (born and living in France) speak English with their respective 'father tongue' accents. When they were small, they only ever heard English being spoken by a British native, so why didn't they learn to speak English like one?
Remember that when children are acquiring the multiple languages, it's not necessarily as simple as them neatly "partitioning off" the two languages into separate areas of their brain.
In the specific case of pronunciation, there is some evidence that even with bilinguals that to native speakers sound no different to a monolingual in the respective language, when you actually analyse their speech instrumentally, you find that they are making 'compromises' between the two languages (e.g. a French-English bilingual might pronounce an English [p] with "just enough" voice onset time to make it sound "English", but in fact less than for an average monolingual English speaker, under influence from French, which whose [p] has a voice onset time closer to zero).
So what you could be observing with your children is this type of phenomenon, just a little "further towards the end of the spectrum".
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| Yes, I have one | Mar 11, 2014 |
To my mind, embarking on countless hours of boring exercise just to get rid of the last vestiges of a foreign accent would be boring and rather wasteful for someone who doesn't really need it, all the more so at the price of losing the purity of one's own native language in consequence.
Helena Chavarria wrote: I accept that after speaking Spanish for 37 years I haven't managed to completely get rid of my British accent (which I have been told is mixed up with a Catalan accent). That follows because I live in Catalonia. What I can't understand is why both my daughters (born and living in Spain) and my sister's daughters (born and living in France) speak English with their respective 'father tongue' accents. When they were small, they only ever heard English being spoken by a British native, so why didn't they learn to speak English like one? Actually, this is a question my mother asked me years ago whilst she was visiting me in Spain; needless to say, I couldn't answer her
Producing the sounds is hard even when you know what they should be. To be able to alternate between completely pure Catalan Spanish and completely pure British English one'd need to have a huge repertoire of different vowels and consonants and one heck of a nimble throat. A perfect British accent is really hard to pull off for someone who speaks a syllabic language by default.
[Edited at 2014-03-11 04:32 GMT]
| | | | Giles Watson
Italy
Local time: 11:37
Italian to English
In memoriam | A little knowledge | Mar 11, 2014 |
Łukasz Gos-Furmankiewicz wrote:
Producing the sounds is hard even when you know what they should be.
Producing sounds is hard if you know what they should be. It's easy when they are they are part of your default ("hardwired") sound map and you don't need to think about them.
completely pure Catalan Spanish and completely pure British English
"Pure"?
What you listen for is a convincing sound set free of non-native marker mistakes. Substituting "t" for "θ" in English is unremarkable if the speaker uses, say, an Irish-English sound set but when it is accompanied by syllable-timing or some other non-native feature, you begin to suspect that English is not the speaker's first language.
A perfect British accent is really hard to pull off for someone who speaks a syllabic language by default.
An excellent point, even if perfection is not of this world 
| | | | | More knowledge | Mar 11, 2014 |
Giles Watson wrote: Łukasz Gos-Furmankiewicz wrote:
Producing the sounds is hard even when you know what they should be. Producing sounds is hard if you know what they should be. It's easy when they are they are part of your default ("hardwired") sound map and you don't need to think about them.
It always puzzled me why it's relatively easy for any Brazilian to understand Spanish, while Spanish speakers have a hard time to understand PT-BR.
(I'm excluding PT-PT here because Brazilians have a hard time understanding it already, in spite of it being one and the same language. The Portuguese under-enunciate - almost suppress - all vowels, if compared to Brazilians.)
Eventually a fellow translator, I think she was from Colombia, gave me the explanation: Spanish lacks some frequently used sounds in PT-BR, mainly the nasal "ção" and "ções" and our "Z" (identical to its equivalent in English).
These sounds are not hardwired to the intact ES speaker. As soon as they add them to their hearing repertoire, they'll start understanding PT*. Otherwise these sounds are read by their brain like the "bleep" used to censor foul words on TV.
* Their problem then turns to the overabundance of false cognates between ES/PT.
However being able to enunciate them properly may take forever. I know (some, most, but not all) originally Spanish-speaking immigrants who, after having lived here for decades, and in spite of writing flawless Portuguese, still say e.g. "Bracil", and either "atençón" or "atençau".
A Japan-born JP language teacher told me that even if he were coached on pronouncing a phrase in Korean, he wouldn't be able to enunciate it in any way a Korean would understand.
Prescriptshawn for dzee Brezilian whoo wouldgee likee too loosy abautchy eightchee percent offee dayer accentchee een English:
- learn to do the TH
- learn the EN 'schwa'
- drop the "e" at the end of verbs in the past (e.g. say work'd, not workEd)
- stop adding "ee" or "y" to the end of every word that ends with a consonant
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Giles Watson wrote:
Producing sounds is hard if you know what they should be. It's easy when they are they are part of your default ("hardwired") sound map and you don't need to think about them.
Well, you gotta start somewhere. Then, there are native speakers with dialect features, getting streamlined by the education system. It probably goes like: here's the sound, now fake it till you make it. I think it isn't that hard unless you're trying to reproduce the sounds of a language unrelated to yours.
"Pure"?
No errors, if not exactly perfect. If that's at all possible for someone who speaks more than one language. Even taking a foreign language to C2 probably changes the way one speaks his own.
What you listen for is a convincing sound set free of non-native marker mistakes. Substituting "t" for "θ" in English is unremarkable if the speaker uses, say, an Irish-English sound set but when it is accompanied by syllable-timing or some other non-native feature, you begin to suspect that English is not the speaker's first language.
And who cares? We learn foreign languages to communicate, not to pretend to be native speakers. Unless we happen to serve in that part of the armed forces which does not normally wear uniforms to work (I guess the same goes for travellers and reporters in dangerous places who need to blend in). Besides, nativeness is overrated. Near-perfect Polish with even noticeable foreign hints still sounds better to me than some sloppy native speak.
An excellent point, even if perfection is not of this world
I suppose most native speakers fall short of it, no matter which language.
José Henrique Lamensdorf wrote:
A Japan-born JP language teacher told me that even if he were coached on pronouncing a phrase in Korean, he wouldn't be able to enunciate it in any way a Korean would understand.
Well. Yeah. That happens with exotic languages. Actually, I think if you teach English to adults in Europe (and in a lesser degree French), you still need to be familiar with their own language to understand the fruit of their early efforts. Perhaps less so with children, who have it easier, and less so with some other languages. Italian isn't that bad for Poles, for example.
Prescriptshawn for dzee Brezilian whoo wouldgee likee too loosy abautchy eightchee percent offee dayer accentchee een English:
- learn to do the TH
- learn the EN 'schwa'
- drop the "e" at the end of verbs in the past (e.g. say work'd, not workEd)
- stop adding "ee" or "y" to the end of every word that ends with a consonant
Apart from the obvious th and schwa you can tell a Pole by:
– stronK,
– moRninG (getting the non-rhotic pronunciation completely right is rare),
– syllabic timing, of course,
– flat intonation, no silly fall-rise, we don't care like that.
Actually, I could do fall-rise, I just don't care. Perhaps because I'm a Pole and the thought of conveying so much emotion in standard speech does not fit inside my wiring.
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| Voice synthesyzer for Polish | Mar 11, 2014 |
Łukasz Gos-Furmankiewicz wrote: Actually, I could do fall-rise, I just don't care. Perhaps because I'm a Pole and the thought of conveying so much emotion in standard speech does not fit inside my wiring.
For the record, I heard Polish being spoken at home every day for the first 25 years of my life. Never learned any of it beyond very basic survival essentials. IMHO its grammar and pronunciation are more complex than German, which I failed to learn as my L6.
Anyway, in these times of modern technology, I expect some famous university researchers will eventually devise a computer-controlled valve on a pressure cooker that will "speak" Polish, with all those different hissing sounds and no vowels in-between.
[Edited at 2014-03-11 17:06 GMT]
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José Henrique Lamensdorf wrote:
Anyway, in these times of modern technology, I expect some famous university researchers will eventually devise a computer-controlled valve on a pressure cooker that will "speak" Polish, with all those different hissing sounds and no vowels in-between.
[Edited at 2014-03-11 17:06 GMT]
Actually, you do need a tiny bit of a vowel in between those consonant clusters or it won't work. Sort of like 'strengths' in English and like the schwa. Polish may be similar to upper-class British English in nearly muting the vowels and prolonging consonants somewhat.
I suppose it's a common feature in all languages that native speakers try to get away with as little effort as possible. Even in English it's possible to roll out full sentences almost without moving one's tongue. Which is not totally unlike how I speak the language (I usually have both my lips stiff when speaking English, but this is possible largely because I don't speak softly, when I try to speak softly all of my face moves).
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