Accent Formation in Foreign Languages Part 3: Analysis

[telpukona]

I am Icelandic, I just gave up on this. Sorry, You kept on talking but I did not think you ever came to the matter and told us about the analyses of Icelandic accent, how it sounds to you and so on.

[philnoll]

Hey man. I do love your videos and I'm glad they're getting so many views. I think the reason it is so popular is cuz...We're all the same, but we have so many differences.

[ceugepios]

YERGHAN HEEGAN DERGAN. happy leepharigson day.

[dextrusable]

Thumbs up if this guy seems like he's desperately trying not to burst into a fit of violent rage at the slightest mispronunciation?

[ApocalypsPlz]

@dextrusable

Life as a monolingual speaker must be so terrible, that you have to make fun of a polyglot who speaks more languages than you do.

[BantzTV]

Thank you Professor, I found you "accidently" by the Grace of God and I have never been this happy in my life. My native language is Kyrgyz, I speak Russian as everybody in former Soviet countries, and I speak Turkish as most kyrgyzs, and I speak English as most of the world and now I am learning French.

I am so privileged to be able to listen to your materials and YOUR WORK IS INVALUABLE AND ENORMOUS HELP. God bless you ;-)

[Tweakerbythespeaker]

Not to be a downer but I felt you were patronizing.

[YouStoleMyTube]

You are actually a big part of my inspiration to learn foreign languages. You're pretty much my hero lol.

[ingsve]

When you learn these languages by listening to pronounciation etc, how does vocabulary enter into it? Do you specifically study vocabulary as well or do you get a lot of that from the close relationship between the languages and then extrapolate from your earlier vocabulary?

[tyl3r218]

hey good job, can you or anyone tell me how to do the automatic deck trick where aces are pushed out of a machine deck? i cant find tutorial anywhere. my number is 8137879990. call or text. thx

[mamushi72sai5575]

when I talk in Spanish people say I sound Japanese ;_;

[jmichaelrout]

@TerhiTheFinn You realize he is an Ivy League graduate, world renowned polyglot, and university professor with decades in learning and teaching several languages, right? I don't know if you've been to university, but you have to PAY for that and even then you don't get to critique your professors. This is like getting a free lecture from Einstein about physics or piano lessons from Mozart. Aside from that, he's very busy and some of us actually prefer thoroughness to glossing over key points.

[78625amginE]

You are a wonderful person. Thank you for all or your videos!

[HesseJamez]

I presume Icelanders aren't used to hear foreigners speaking their language - NOBODY - but you - can!

[mulleygraves]

also, I spent a week with a friend's relatives in Finland. Some people told me that when I tried to speak Finnish I sounded native. A large part of that would be my phonetics studies following French. But really, it sucks that I can't do the accent of the one foreign language I speak fluently. Finnish does seem super phonetic and easy though, easier than any other language I've seen once you beat the double consonants and vowels. I think if you continued your study of it you'd master it quickly.

[guavacaffeine]

@mulleygraves I'm learning Finnish, too, and I've noticed that the language really is much more phonetic than many others! I'm learning a little Finnish and Swedish, and even though Swedish vocab is a lot easier, Finnish pronunciation is really easy for me.

[mulleygraves]

It's pretty interesting. I lived in France and studied it for 5 years and can understand it and speak it near fluently. I studied Russian for about 2 year and am terrible at it. I put a video up with me speaking both languages. Russians say I sound good and French people say I sound terrible. Either French taught me how to hear languages so I heard Russian like that from the beginning or Russian is just much closer to English than French is. You're like my language idol though.

[Dolichocephalus]

They had a better Japanese accent than a Brazilian. I think this is because Japanese has five vowels like Spanish except the unrounded U. On the other hand, Portuguese has open and closed vowels, plus nazals, all of which are absent in Spanish.

[jceja24]

the ñ is nasal sounds in spanish.

[Dolichocephalus]

I think the relative closeness of language hasn't got much to with the ease of acquiring a good accent... Maybe the Swedish phonemes are just closer to what you're used to than Dutch.

I studied at this university in Chile where native spanish-speaking students were to learn Japanese and Portuguese at the same time. And even though their command of Portuguese was obviously better than their Japanese, it wasn't so with their accent.

[Gnug215]

In my experience there seems to be something of a natural cut-off point for learning an accent properly, age wise.

Beyond 14-15 years it seems people will never get it totally right.

It makes sense, I suppose, as the brain loses elasticity when moving into adulthood.

I've always felt that imitation would is the best way to really learn a language/accent perfectly, and children are really the masters of imitation.

It's a shame that adults tend to lose this ability.

[jceja24]

Even when I go back to the country with my first language, they can tell ive been out of the region for a while

[jceja24]

I believe too many people look too much into the accents. Everybody has them!  Even people within the same country, the same state, heck event the same city! (At least here in Los Angeles)

[mmon831]

Can someone please tell me what time he starts talking about swedish accent

[cocoabutter888]

@mmon831 about 20 minutes in

[CharlieBrenja]

You should really come visit Iceland for 1 or 2 weeks, just to get to know the country itself. The nature is, like the languge, very special.

Also, if you would try speaking Icelandic to Icelanders, they would be really, really, really amazed.

[faelismaegnus]

I live in Germany and can understand and read German very well. But my speech is not so great, probably because I speak German with my German wife at home. I'm a historian and my wife is a speech pathologist. Currently I teach ESL to Germans. We are rearing my son in English and German: Any tips to make his learning easier or better? Just some quick tips. I don't have time for consultations or forums.

[QJP1985]

Dear Prof,

Have you successfully overcome your problem of your Icelandic accent? I find my French having the similar situation as your Icelandic. I had already post my problem regarding this issue in your forum. Your advise will be a great help to me as I feel retarded for unable to expressthe things I know. Thank you.

[ProfASAr]

We should discuss this in detail on the forum. No, I have not overcome my problem, which is merely that I have never had living exposure to the language, and so for that matter I have not yet had the opportunity to try to improve. You should know that, while it is not impossible, it is very hard indeed to overcome ingrained incorrectness, and you probably require the assistance of a professional phonetician in order to do so.

[zlatantillifk]

You speak very good swedish Sir. Impressive how you even got the tonation spot on. What a natural talent!

[highinheaven]

you're a really cool dude. I'm a native english speaker, learning german and hopefully swedish. you are an inspiration!

[schwabel61]

This is quite similar to what happened to me. My native language was Polish, but I switched over to German when I was about 7 years old. Now I've even lost much of my Polish and I'm totally fluent in German, but I was told that my accent is kind of Polish when I speak English...

[ErikWithBrain]

You have a very interesting accent when you speak English, too. Where in the US did you grow up? You sound almost Canadian in many ways.

[pdawg2005]

Very interesting post. The part that stuck out with me though was the about your experience with Dutch and Swedish and how you thought the passive listening as opposed to actively figuring out the sound system actually hurt your pronunciation. Could it possibly be because you spent relatively little time listening passively to Dutch? Maybe for passive assimilation you need more exposure? ALGworld says you need 6-800 hours for Thai. Your Dutch presents an interesting problem with this theory

[ProfASAr]

I did not keep records at the time, but I basically listened to the tapes for an hour a day every day as I went for my morning run for a period of continuous months - enough for me to gain a complete passive understanding of the book of 100 dialogs for which they were recorded. Probably around 120 hours?? Far less than that Thai estimate, but for a far easier language... and at any rate, the real point is: I had 0 hours for Swedish in which I fared far better, accent wise.

[pdawg2005]

Obviously you can learn a language and its sound system by actively trying to imitate or look up an outline of a sound system done by a linguist (I did that when I learned Vietnamese). However, your claim that the passive listening hurt your Dutch is the point that I would really like to find out more about (Both from you and as a general idea). On a slightly different note, how do you feel the passive listening affected the other areas of language (grammar, word choice, etc...)?

[ProfASAr]

Unfortunately, there is no room to have a detailed discussion in this commentary column. If your interest is theoretical, then you can ask questions of me on the language learning forum. If, however, you really want to go into the matter so as to establish the most effective means of studying languages for you, then I encourage you to sign up for a one-to-one consultation on my new site, thelanguage-coach, which should be up and running in just a few days.

[zappy]

I think you need to take in account that Dutch has a very difficult pronounciation in general, this also explains your rather strange (but nonetheless understandable) accent.

[FinweLordOfTheNoldor]

Do you think a phonetic study would be helpful in learning a language, coupled with a voice recorder? Brief elaboration: After basic understanding of grammar, some vocabulary etc., to sit at computer, listen to audio, and recite back, but also read from texts. Then analyze phonetic structure, and compare with own voice. Basically, I am wondering if you think this would be a comparable alternative to having a personal phonetician to help you, of course all this assuming vigorous study.

[ProfASAr]

I do think this would be a valuable and helpful method of self-correction, but I do not think any method of self-correction can ever be a comparable to working with a personal phonetician.

[ptpark]

Very interesting and helpful. I wonder if the cultural differences between Sweden and the Netherlands affected the type of comments that you received? If the Dutch are thinking something, they're more likely to say it. This is, of course, not always true, but being direct seems to be quite common in the Dutch culture.

[paulkiss1981]

Thanks, as always, very informative and interesting.

Would be nice to watch your videos on Slavic langs in future.

[paulkiss1981]

Thanks, as always, very informative and interesting.

Would be nice to watch your videos on Slavic langs in future.

[jonmahoney04]

I'm concerned about your speculation that passive listening hindered your accent development. I've been really enjoying reading the blog All Japanese All The Time and it seems that in 'progressive' linguistics in general the shift is towards a great amount input in the target language with little to no output throughout the beginning stages.

Using Khatz from the AJATT blog as an example, he was able to reach near native fluency with this method and reports being assumed a native on the phone.

[Chazzoli]

Just as a matter of interest, is English the only language which uses the alveolar approximate for "r"?

[alto5alto]

Good Question! There are a few Brazilian Portuguese accents that use the same "r" as North American and Irish English. It sounds super funny!

[mxjgr]

Isn't the "r" in the Irish English rolled in similar fashion as in the Scottish accent?

I find this quite different to the Amercian pronounciation!

[SagittariusChik]

Nope. With the Scottish accent, they tend to roll the "r" whereas the Irish do not.

[SalemNederHop]

In most ''common dutch'' dialects... in most urban areas of the country, the sound is very common, though only preceded by a vowel and proceded by a consonant which is not followed by another vowel... i.e. hard, kort, ver, gaar, baard

[mxjgr]

There are also some regional dialects in Germany (e.g. Northern Hessia) which use this kind of pronounciation.

There are even some rumours claiming that the American pronounciation actually stems from the many Hessians which were transferred during the Independance War by the British to the new colonies and who defected to the Pioneer side and spoke the English language like they were used to speak German. ;-)

[HesseJamez]

@mxjgr

It's not Northern Hesse - I presume you mean the "Wetterau" a landscape north of Frankfurt (so it's more Southern Hesse), they really sound like Americans trying to speak german there - a very funny tribe!

The Northern Hesse - where I'm living - accent sounds very different, more like Saxonian..

[Green4321]

Accents! Such an emotionally charged issue. And I cannot hold myself blameless. As a youth, my classmates and I would make fun of older people who spoke English with a Dutch accent. If those dear old folks were still with us, I would offer them a sincere apology.

[PirateXzibit]

I sat through the whole video, really interesting.

It's not really acceptable to let immature 14 years old go on and insulting people or just being overall rude. What does that tell you about them?

I really like the germanic languages and what I really like is that I have an advantage as born in Sweden, when studying other languages. I live in a very multicultural part of Sweden and I am constantly bombarded with foreign languages. Ive never thought of learning, until I came across your videos.

[thelinguistblogger]

Much of this goes hand in hand with an observation that I have made based on my own experience. That is that the aspects of knowing a language (reading, writing, speaking and listening comprehension) are less interrelated than most people think. Though reading well does spill over a bit into speaking, listening, etc. it doesn't do nearly as much as trying to speak or doing speaking exercises.

[villainousturtle]

Wow! I can speak pathetic Spanish. That's it. I went to Spain for 5 weeks, and took some classes. Even so, your video was interesting all the way through. I guess it's because the subject is interesting and you are an incredible person. I would say that you should be able to get away with having a thick accent in some languages and not so thick in others because of your immense knowledge of languages and your lack of direct exposure to some of them. Either way, you're amazing!

[bjorinn]

As a swede I can say that many of us are quite tolerant when it comes to foreign accents (swedish spoken by guests/tourists in the country that is). We are often also very interested in people who are interested in our language and our culture, so you can expect many positive comments for your accent simply by trying your best and showing interest in learning.

I'm not saying you don't have a good accent. I just wanted to let you in on a cultural secret ;)

[PirateXzibit]

Yea, me too. I love teaching Swedish and seeing other people trying to learn the language. I guess I guess I'm not alone in that way of thinking that those people have some attraction to them.

[Duratror]

Thank you very much, Professor! Interesting as always.