Comments on: Getting rid of your English accent when speaking a foreign language

By: The Language Hacking Guide - recenzja

The Language Hacking Guide - recenzja — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 12:12:49 +0000

[...] „particular language issues”, a szczególnie podrozdział o redukowaniu akcentu. Benny napisał taki artykuł dla anglojęzycznych odbiorców, ale przydałyby się też dodatkowe ogólne wskazówki jak opanować nowe dźwięki czy [...]

By: mavtraveler

mavtraveler — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 11:05:32 +0000

Agreed about Russian learned by foreigners sounding terrible. I can pick up a foreigner in the first one or two words.

I have met some people who spoke fluent Russian but the accents are usually terrible. Even for people who've lived in Russia for 5 years or more, speaking fluently but of course I can tell they're not from there.

I'm convinced you gotta be born there or at least move there when young to have no accent.

By: mavtraveler

mavtraveler — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 11:00:10 +0000

One more place I found an R similar to the English R, and that is Brazilian Portuguese spoken in Sao Paulo. Their R gives them easily away as being from Sao Paulo.

By: Jamie

Jamie — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 21:59:27 +0000

Hey, I'm coming late to the party but *love* your site. I started languages like you did – older than anyone thought it possible and with Spanish. Luckily, I was completely immersed in the language by outside influences and learned it really quickly. Unluckily, I thought that meant I was just a genius and next took on Russian by studying it in school – I ended up with a minor but without speaking the lanuage. Now I'm in Tajikistan, speaking Russian and Persian/Tajik, neither as expertly as I'd like. At any rate, I find this blog super inspiring.

I think that maybe Dominicans were just really polite, but they were constantly telling me I had no accent at all, and that other than being white they'd think I was one. I don't know if I'd go that far, but my accent wasn't recognizable as American to most people. I did spend a lot of work on sounds like r and l, but on some of the “easier” things I found out later that there was a “trick” to the sound and then I'd realize I was already doing it. Things like pronouncing b and v a bit more like the English b a the start of a word and more like a v in in the middle. Or adding a bit of a “th” to “d”s. I got all of that by spending the vast majority of my time with native speakers *and* thinking of myself as a “we” with them. I don't pick up an accent if I don't identify with the people around me. While the overt work was necessary, I was able to do a bunch subconsciously by going from “me/them” to “we/us.”

As far as consonants/vowels go, I always feel like I'm using an entirely different mouth when I'm speaking in Spanish and I've got my accent on. That's certainly helped me with Tajik, though they don't do things so cleanly.

By: cm

cm — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 03:15:21 +0000

Do you have a post about your experiences in India? I would love to hear about how you learned to pronounce Hindi, since that's the language I am learning.

By: ElGuapo

ElGuapo — Mon, 17 May 2010 01:32:46 +0000

Agreed. Mexican 'R' sounds absolutely nothing like American 'R'

By: ElGuapo

ElGuapo — Mon, 17 May 2010 01:29:13 +0000

Nothing wrong with a NY accent. I myself have a bit of a Brooklyn accent, and I don't mind it at all. Staten Island accent is a bit strong though.

By: ElGuapo

ElGuapo — Mon, 17 May 2010 01:23:15 +0000

Interesting. My native language is Russian and I moved to The States around age 11. My Russian is still fluent, and although I have a NY accent, some people were able to pickup a trace of Russian in it (only NY'ers). English of course is the easiest for me to read and write.

By: Eric Normand

Eric Normand — Mon, 10 May 2010 23:30:26 +0000

I would suggest picking a few sentences and drilling them out loud. Start slowly, pronounce everything very well, and repeat repeat repeat. You are training your muscles, here.

By: Abby

Abby — Mon, 10 May 2010 22:29:19 +0000

My husband is a native Egyptian, and has lived about 1/2 of his life (31 years) in the U.S. He learned English here, in Cincinnati, actually, so often speaks with a very “Ohioan” accent. He used to re-gain his Egyptian accent when he was tired, about 10 years ago, but now, he almost speaks Arabic with an “ohio” accent most of the time. We visited Egypt last year, and only after 2 weeks of being in an Arabic saturated environment was he able to speak Arabic with the “correct” Egyptian accent.
I am loving this blog, because I need to learn Egyptian Arabic, as we are moving there in 16 months. All my husband's family speaks English, his mother is an English teacher, which has made it very difficult for me to pick up the language, and my husband is not that motivated to help me learn it, either.

By: cass

cass — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 08:53:13 +0000

For some people it IS impossible to roll the R's — indisputable evidence: I know a native Spanish speaker, a Spaniard who has never left Spain, who cannot do it. I just felt compelled to mention that although this post is really old haha… But I do agree that most people can learn, I have myself.

By: Benny the Irish polyglot

Benny the Irish polyglot — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 00:26:37 +0000

I wouldn't really call that an “exception”, it's more of a strong influence from English for obvious reasons. It could also be that they simply don't speak Spanish that well… In standard Mexican Spanish (at least in the little I've been exposed to it), the r sounds nothing like in English.

By: xxdb

xxdb — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 00:17:37 +0000

Exactly.
I have learned Spanish by watching TV and hanging around with Mexicans.
I can read it now, but I sometimes find myself surprised by how it's written.
I believe that if you learn a language from a *book* then your native pronunciation of the letters will *for ever* influence your pronunciation.
I tried learning some Russian words just from a cassette tape and tried them out on a friend from the Ukraine. He said that nearly all foreigners have a crap accent that makes their Russian sound horrible but mine was neutral sounding and very well pronounced.
Conversely, on the other hand, I tried to learn some mandarin from chinesepod and I clearly remember a phrase that sounds (something like) "wachou Jenny Wong" meaning I'm called Jenny Wong. When I tried it with my own name, my Chinese friend couldn't understand me at all. He said what I was saying sounds like the English "Watch Out" and was nothing like what I should have been saying.

That said, I still lean towards that learning the basics of pronunciation by listening to a whole bunch of spoken words is the best method for learning pronunciation and is way, way better than learning written....

By: xxdb

xxdb — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 00:04:51 +0000

Hmmm. You may be interested to note the exception to the “r” thing.
In Mexican spanish spoken near the US border, they tend to pronounce the r more or less the same as we do. The Spanish r in Spain is much more pronounced and similar to the Scottish r. If you listen to a Spaniard say “pero” and a Mexican say “Perro” it sounds pretty similar…

By: Caroline L

Caroline L — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 20:22:38 +0000

The only other language that I speak with conversational fluency is Spanish. My teacher from Pais Vasco told us that we no longer sounded American, but we did not sound Spanish. My principal told me that I sound French when I speak Spanish and on the way back to the States, a random guy on the plane told me I sounded Italian. I do not know why this is.

By: Fast Jay

Fast Jay — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 21:50:35 +0000

The rolling “r” of spanish is indeed one of the tricky points of the language. And yes, during my stay in spain i noticed that a lot of native english speakers don't even try to roll the r somewhat.

I'd say my r was halfway there, but now, in the last two months i've been practising it a bit more and paying attention to it, and you really can advance fast, it's just about practise and getting your mouth/tongue used to the new movements. You can compare it to a sport, it takes some time to master the technique.

By: fsilber

fsilber — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 22:46:52 +0000

It's interesting what you say about the pronunciation of the letter `R'. Newspaper columnist Dave Barry once pointed out that the letter `R' is mispronounced in most foreign languages, and to speak those languages like a native one must learn to mispronounce it the same way native speakers do.

By: CCS

CCS — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 04:49:29 +0000

Indeed, I used to describe Beijinghua as “pirate Chinese”–not because of any sea-thieving tendencies but because they go “Arrr, arrrr!” all the time, like movie pirates.

By: Jerry

Jerry — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 17:15:17 +0000

Great comments about accents – the learner is using the pronunciation rules of his/her mother tongue while attempting to speak the new language, hence many accents are easy to pick out. Deliberately getting rid of one's accent is a laudable goal, but it will always be there to some small extent, especially if (1) we're using the language all day and (2) we're getting tired. Speaking from experience there.

Re the English-language “r”: its phonetic name is the “cupped r”, taken from the shape one's mouth takes to form it, as opposed to the trilled r, which you noted. The easiest way to demonstrate the trilled r in English is by pronouncing the word “butter” in the American, not the British (or Irish?) fashion. There it is in all its glory.

The Chinese “r” in the initial placement is sort of a combination of the cupped r and the sound that the “s' makes in the word pleasure. “Renshi ni wo hen gaoxing” (Pleased to meet you) gives a good example of the sound in that part of an utterance. As another commenter noted, its English equivalent is even more obvious in the terminal spot, as in “ydianr' (“a little”, pronounced ee-dee-are). Only Chinese linguists know why the unpronounced “n” is in the pinyin spelling of that word!!

By: Vítor De Araújo

Vítor De Araújo — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 07:48:09 +0000

"I haven’t come across any other language (yet) that uses R the way we do in English."

I believe Faroese 'r' is just like English 'r'...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faroese_language