I’d find it interesing to hear what you think of reducing foreign accents. What kind of experiences have you had in English speaking countries with a foreign accent? I’d be particularly interested in hearing what experienced non-native teachers of English such as Torsten and Conchita think about this. Do native speakers place you as native speakers? Those of you who are native speakers, have you ever met a person that you’ve placed as a native speaker but who is, in fact, a highly proficient non-native speaker?
I don’t think that there is anything wrong with having a foreign accent, but I do find it interesting to discuss how much a foreign accent can be reduced.
Speaking very quit with a normal pace, and with flat accent
or no accent ,of course correctly ,well no playing no making something like show-off ,just modest sentences with safe natural vocabulary.
Finish so fast as possible mission completed run for your live
Confuse natives by having umbrella and drinking local beer.
This wouldn’t be for Sailor Jan , Sailor Jan wouldn’t be himself without roaring and curseing in few languages in no one correct what is quite easy to recognize unfourtunatly but good news is Sailor Jan at least
may drink any beer even English.
I have met a number of non-native speakers who I initially assumed to be native speakers of English. Generally speaking, these are usually people who have also lived in an English speaking country for a number of years. And, of course, children can pick up “accent-free” pronunciation (i.e., pick up the local accent) like greased lightning when totally immersed in an English speaking environment.
But, it’s much more than the accent (or “lack” thereof) that causes people to assume “native speaker”. The usage of the language is just as important. Considering how many different sounds of “native” English there are, I’m tempted to ask myself what a “foreign accent” actually is. I’m aware that you seem to be a fan of the so-called “RP”. But, for me, that is also English with a foreign accent. Nothing more.
Amy
PS @ Cap’n Jan, HMS 007
You certainly are a man of many hats, talents and locations!
Did these people have American accents? I think that it’s quite usual for Americans to assume that non-native speakers of English are native speakers if they (i.e. non-native speakers) are very proficient in English and have British accents. However, British people would be likely to place them as non-natives. And vice versa, I would assume.
This is true, of course, but I definitely think that especially for non-native speakers of English with a very good command of the language a foreign accent is likely to reveal that you’re a non-native speaker (and not the fact that there are so many grammar errors to be found in your speech, for instance: it simply is easier to learn grammar rules than to get rid of an accent).
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Amy wrote: I’m tempted to ask myself what a “foreign accent” actually is. I’m aware that you seem to be a fan of the so-called “RP”. But, for me, that is also English with a foreign accent.
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What I mean when I use the term “foreign accent” is a non-native accent. That is, British, American, Maltese, South African, Australian and Canadian accents, among many others, are, in my view, native accents. On the other hand, I would say that e.g. a Dutch accent or a Taiwanese accent is a foreign accent.
I assumed you were asking whether a native-speaker who teaches ESL (as opposed to your average garden variety native-speaker) had ever made the “native speaker” assumption. And my answer to that assumed question was “yes, initially”. On initially meeting a few very proficient non-native speakers it’s happened — both in cases of “British sounding” English as well as “American sounding” English. And while I agree I’d be more likely to pick up on a difference in “American English”, I’ve been at my craft long enough and have worked with enough Brits to have a relatively respectable ear for British English. Believe me, a person really has to be extremely good for me not to pick up on their “non-native speaker” status immediately.
If the average American picks up on a few slight pronunciation oddities, do you think that they’ll dwell on that? Listen in a detailed manner for any little tell-tale slip that might be a give-away of national origin and then pounce on it with a great whoop of “Ah-HA!”?
Of course not. They simply recognize a proficient speaker as proficient. There may be some subconscious realization that there’s something a little different, but that won’t matter.
If the accent is British or clearly foreign, one of the first questions an American will then ask is “Are you from Britain?” or “Where are you from?” And then the nationality will be revealed. That will most likely be followed by a compliment about the non-native speaker’s command of English. And, then the conversation will continue on to other things. The question of accent will generally not be an issue at all.
Only if the accent is relatively strong — in other words, still heavily influenced by a person’s mother tongue — will there be any kind of definite, conscious notice. But even then, if the non-native speaker is still clearly understandable and makes only minor errors, there is normally never any kind of problem.
I was well aware of what you meant by “foreign accent”. But I also think it’s relevant to consider just how many “native” English accents there are. And that each of them is “foreign” to the speakers of the other “versions”. How many Brits might incorrectly identify someone from Canada as coming from the USA based on accent alone? How many Brits can correctly identify a South African accent? If someone from Britain couldn’t identify an accent as being South African, would they then simply assume “non-native speaker”? And if that assumption were made, then you’d have a native speaker in the same boat as a very proficient non-native speaker. And then?
Losing a foreign accent or picking up a ‘good’ one is, as with music, very much a question of ear. As I’ve said before, unless students have a privileged ear or start learning very young, they won’t often acquire a native’s accent.
On the other hand, some people don’t even want or dare to perfect their pronunciation, as I have experienced: they might be perfectly capable of imitating other accents, but feel they sound ridiculous when they do. Others, as odd as it might seem, plainly and simply don’t like the sound of the language they are learning and prefer to keep their own accent, however coarse. I swear I’m not making all this up – I have personally encountered this category of learners.
The happy truth, however, is that foreign accents (as is the case with regional accents) give a lot of spice and warmth to the language – some more than others, be it also said. Since you have asked, though I wouldn’t mind speaking with a Spanish accent, the thing is I haven’t got one! It sounds awfully arrogant, but it’s true. One of these days we might really talk to each other on the site and you’ll ‘see’ what I mean. My accent is kind of neutral and decidedly British at the same time, as I’ve been told often enough. The other day, while talking to some American missionary teachers, I caught myself using an ever so slight French lilt in my speech! It felt as if my accent was playing tricks on me and taking advantage of my excitement!
This is an interesting and very relevant question. What do you think? Would a Brit, who is unable to place an accent as South African, really assume that the person is a non-native speaker, or would he or she rather think that the person must be from some other English speaking country?
I know, and I think that people should be allowed to retain a regional accent. The situation may be a bit different for ESL/EFL teachers: to avoid confusion it is probably good if the teacher has a native sounding accent. Besides, students, especially young ones, are just as as good as imitating a native accent as they are at imitating a foreign one.
Congratulations, Conchita, for your achievment! Out of curiosity, which accent have you used as your learning model?
It’s more a matter of which accent I’ve been most exposed to, really – any variety would have been equally gladly copied, mind you. As it happens, I was taught what used to be called Oxford English (sorry, Alan!), later known as BBC English or RP. The latter, which, in its turn, might as well be dead or on its last legs, for all I know, sounds funny to me: an ‘harpie’ in French is a pejorative term meaning ‘old witch’!
My very first school English was probably tinted with a touch of French, since, as circumstances had it, I was living in Lausanne at the time. Later on, a stay in England definitely left its brand or imprint on my pronunciation (and hopefully took some of the formality away )!
How about you, Englishuser? May I return your question and ask what kind of accent you have? Are you satisfied with it or would you rather speak differently?
It’s not just the ear. It’s the ear and the mouth. Many students can hear the difference between a native and a foreign accent very easily, but they don’t know how to make the mouth movements correctly.
Sometimes accent problems are a matter of transcription. When I teach pronunciation to Japanese people, the first thing I do is force them to use IPA and to stop using their syllabic writing to indicate pronunciation. Japanese has far fewer syllable structures than English, and except for [n], every consonant MUST be followed by a vowel. This means, for example, that when you teach the word “treat”, and you see a Japanese notating the pronunciation in his own script, he is really writing [turito]. He’ll say “treat” in front of you in the lesson, but later he’ll study his notes and wind up in the habit of saying [turito], and then it’s very hard to break. It’s a major problem in ESL in Japan, I understand, and I’ve seen it among Japanese employees in the US.
In my life most of those people fit into two categories: (1) Adolescents who use a bad accent because they don’t want to show off in front of their peers. (2) Outrageously arrogant professional people who emotionally can’t take correction, are too tied to the text and refuse to believe that certain letters don’t indicate the same sound as in their own languages.
People in that second category don’t listen to anybody. I had to give accent training to an East European lawyer who was still not pronouncing her husband’s three-letter, one syllable first name correctly after five years of marriage in the US. She’d obviously heard him say it, heard his family say it, heard people everywhere say it, but when I told her how to pronounce it right, she was completely shocked. This is the same type of person who will pronounce “vegetable” with four syllables. When you show them how to pronounce it with three, they’ll say they’re speaking “British” English. When you point out that the British pronounce it with three syllables just as the Americans do, they will still argue with you. This kind of person usually starts accent training because he realizes his accent is causing problems in his career. When he gets to the lessons, he argues with and resists almost all correction, and then when his pronunciation doesn’t improve, he blames the teacher. This is why I often refuse to give pronunciation lessons to people who have advanced English but can’t be understood. If their native is Spanish or some language of East Asia, there’s no problem. If their native language is some European language other than Spanish, and they still can’t be understood, I generally assume that the person needs psychotherapy before pronunciation training can start.
Englishuser, you seem to persist in the belief that when an American says, “You have a British accent,” he really thinks the person has a British accent. It’s not usually true. Very often they say this to people who have a German, Japanese or some other accent, but whose English is clearly British influenced. They’ll remark on the “British accent” while clearly being able to hear that the person is German or Japanese. It’s similar to when people in some countries say someone’s language is “perfect”. They can hear very clearly that the person doesn’t speak perfectly, but in this case “perfect” means “much better than I would have expected”. I used to get this “perfect” remark about my Czech at a stage when my Czech was relatively awful. It just meant the fluency of my Czech was a surprise.
It does happen that an American will hear a foreigner with extremely fluent, British-influenced English and think the person is British, while the British hear a foreign accent. I have a former student like this. She has lived in the UK for nine years, and to me sounds completely British. People in London, however, judge her as foreign, but they have to listen to her very hard, and then they can’t detect where she might really be from.
On the other hand, my brother and I get a kick out of the accents of actors in British films who are supposed to sound American. They usually don’t. They might sound vaguely Welsh or Irish, or have some other odd accent. One actor said only one word in the whole movie – “yes” – but his pronunciation was so wrong that we were joking about it for a couple of days. My local bank has been bought by the Royal Bank of Scotland, and the actors in the TV advertisements have convincing American accents, but they have strange haircuts, strangely cut clothes, their physical movements don’t look normal, and sometimes the jokes in the ads have that special British “not funny” quality (to us). It can also be disorienting to hear American actors read dialogue that was written for them by British screenwriters. The dead giveaway is that they say “brilliant” and “lovely” too much, and that even men will say “lovely” frequently or use “fancy” as a verb, both of which sound very effeminate in America.
Right you are, Jamie. I clearly remember having some difficulty pronouncing the sound [a] at the beginning. When my teacher noticed it, she made me repeat it until I got it right – the whole class was staring at me by then (teenagers that we were :roll: !). I felt awkward and self-conscious (as so often at that ‘painful’ age) and was sure that my mouth had a comical twist. Eventually, the teacher was either satisfied with my pronunciation or weary of insisting and thankfully left me alone.
I’ve encountered those time and time again and even occasionally felt this way myself!
And how about when American actors do British accents? Take Ren?e Zellweger as Bridget Jones, for example: to me, she sounded very convincing.
My high school German teacher was from Holland. She spoke German with a bad Dutch accent and didn’t know it. She insisted we imitate her speech. The better we were at imitating her, the more she heard the accent was wrong when WE spoke with it, and the more time we had to spend after school in the language lab. Finally I realized she didn’t sound ANYTHING like the people in the recordings, and I imitated them instead of her. At last I was set free. My accent supposedly got so good that she (and other people) thought my family were Germans and spoke German at home, but they weren’t. Unlike you, I got a kick out of having as perfect an accent as possible. I didn’t care what the other kids thought.
You have to ask that of a British person. Some have told me that she sounded perfect right down to every nuance. I can’t say. I do know that some American actors do a HORRIBLE job of British accents. The famous example is D*ck Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. (The software won’t let me post his real first name, which also happens to be that of our vice president.) There are some really bad ones. Even more American actors do a terrible Australian accent.
I’m sure you realise that there actually are people belonging to the “second category”. Besides, I think that Americans who ask you from what part of England you are quite obviously think that you have something of a British accent. What is more, even when you tell some Americans that you are from a European country (that is not English speaking), they may ask you if English is the language of the country (probably owing to one’s English proficiency).
I agree with you, Amy: a course like this had better be good. However, I must admit that I very highly doubt that you can learn to speak conservative RP so easily. By the way, I think that it’s a bit interesting that American people tend to be quite bad at noticing differencies in different British accents. I’ve had some American ESL teachers listen to recordings of Queen Elizabeth II’s speech, and many of them told me that it sounds the same as the English you hear on BBC. Surprising, isn’t it?
Don’t forget ‘ghastly’! ‘Awful’ and ‘gosh’ are very much part of my vocabulary , but I had never heard ‘dang’ before! Since we’re at it, are there any other terms that sound very posh to you?
The same probably holds true for the British and other nations as regards American (and other) accents. This is absolutely normal and logical, wouldn’t you say?
In fact, how can you be good at differentiating accents if you have not been previously exposed to all of them?
Not so surprising any more, Englishuser. Bear in mind that Queen Liz’s accent is supposed to have changed over the years. According to BBC News, “her English is drifting down the social hierarchy” or, in plain language, becoming less posh.
Anyway, although “younger members of the Royal Family, such as Prince William, have been heard to use glottal stops”, “the Queen is not likely to start dropping her aitches”!
That’s an intersting link, Conchita. I bet Cap’n Jan will find it interesting, too. Unless, as a sailor, he’s already aware of it, that is.
I used “awful gosh dang” because for me that language is about as far from “posh” as you can get. On the other hand, saying “gosh dang” is theoretically less offensive or more polite than saying what it really means. But, hey, who are we kidding (other than the forum software)? :lol:
It has change, of course, just like anybody else’s accent, but it’s still far from a BBC accent. For those of you who haven’t heard Queen Elizabeth speak too recently, I can suggest the below link: royal.gov.uk. Then go to “Media centre” and “Video and audio”. Over there, you can listen to Queen Elizabeth’s Mansion House speech. Please let me know what you think: is Her Majesty’s accent close to a BBC accent?
Detroit, Michigan, and Windsor, Ontario, are only two minutes apart, but their accents are glaringly different. The residents of both cities can hear the difference immediately, but people from Scotland can’t hear it at all and think we alll sound American.
Native English speakers from South Africa are generally mistaken for Australians by native English speakers all over the world. The English came to both countries around the same time, from more or less the same places, so the accents are similar. People from East London are often mistaken for Australians too.
)!
On the other hand, saying “gosh dang” is