Can anyone attain a near-native accent?

Jasper   Sat Oct 25, 2008 6:45 pm GMT
Tom, I don't know if you remember my email exchange with you some time ago. Assuming you don't (you must have 100s of email correspondence), it seemed at one point that you believed that almost anyone could attain a near-native accent if they tried hard enough. (Admittedly, this is merely my perception; I could have been wrong.)

I have recently reread your website. Now, it seems that you concede that near-native pronunciation requires a certain gift--a talent for mimicry. Anyone, however, can dramatically improve their pronunciation. I agree with your reassessment, Tom.

On an unrelated note, I think your website is more aesthetically pleasing than it used to be.
Tom   Sat Oct 25, 2008 7:20 pm GMT
Jasper,

I don't remember our e-mail exchange (sorry!), but I don't think I ever said ANYONE could speak like a native. Perhaps I thought it was possible for a larger percentage of people than I do now. But after trying to train several people in pronunciation, I couldn't escape from the fact that some people get the sound almost right on the first attempt, while others take days of repetitions. If you don't have the talent, you need loads of work to make up for it. And sometimes the effort may not be worth, um, the effort. Speaking like a native has its advantages, but if it's going to take 2 years of hard work, you're probably better off doing something else with your life.

On the other hand, people in Holland and Sweden speak quite pleasant English and they can't all be gifted... so I think "pleasant pronunciation" is achievable for perhaps 80% of the population. By "pleasant", I mean "universally understandable" and "does not cause listener fatigue after 2 minutes".

Thanks for your comment about esthetics. It means a lot to me.

Tom
TommyHawk:   Sat Oct 25, 2008 7:57 pm GMT
<< And sometimes the effort may not be worth, um, the effort.>>

Did you mean to say TIME there after um?
eeuuian   Sat Oct 25, 2008 8:28 pm GMT
<< Now, it seems that you concede that near-native pronunciation requires a certain gift--a talent for mimicry.>>

Given enough time and immersion, can't most people speak with near-native accent?

Anecdotal evidence: I know a guy who came here as a teenager with his family from China in the early 60's. Now, after less than 50 years of total immersion, his accent is almost indistinguishable from the typical accent you hear around here.
Jasper   Sun Oct 26, 2008 5:51 am GMT
❝Given enough time and immersion, can't most people speak with near-native accent? ❞

The short answer is "no". As Tom has correctly noted, near-native pronunciation depends upon a number of factors, the most important being a talent for mimicry. (This is why you see some talented actors who are able to speak without an accent; isn't acting mimicry by nature?)

I once knew a Jewish-German woman who'd immigrated to the US in 1948. She became completely immersed in the English language, with no exposure whatever to German. After over 40 years of this constant exposure to English, she told me, "I cannot think in German anymore." Her command of the English language was nearly perfect, even understanding the complexities of the English language. Despite these near-optimal conditions for language development, she still spoke in a rather heavy German accent--even after all those years.
koadsoksdako   Sun Oct 26, 2008 6:01 am GMT
Is it possible that someone can have absolutely atrocious pronunciation in one language but be capable of near-native pronunciation in another? Can it happen just arbitrarily like that, on an individual to individual basis or is it contingent on the actually nature of the language in question?
Jasper   Sun Oct 26, 2008 4:37 pm GMT
↑ Koad, I think it is. Allow me to explain.

Just for fun, I have shadowed, for very short periods of time, Spanish, French, and German. Being a native English speaker, I'd always thought Spanish--which is purportedly the easiest language to learn --would be easiest to shadow. Much to my surprise, it was the hardest of the three. Even more surprising, German was the easiest.

I posit the theory that languages that are closest to our native tongue phonetically are intrinsically easier to pronounce than tongues more foreign to it. Spanish is a completely labial tongue--all the words are pronounced in the extreme front of the mouth. By contrast, German, despite having some gutteral sounds (the "ch" sound is of particular note), is pronounced in the mouth in a more similar place in the mouth to English.

If we want to carry this theory further, it stands to reason that my own accent would be far more pronounced in Spanish than in German. Continuing on in this vein of thought, it would be interesting to hear a German speaking Spanish...
Randy   Wed Oct 29, 2008 12:53 am GMT
I'm a native Spanish speaker and I've heard only two americans spoke like us in my country in all of my life. I didn't know that it's so difficult for americans to speak Spanish without accent. They have plenty of problems to pronounce the "r" correctly in Spanish words. I'd say that it is easier for Latinos to learn to speak English well than for people from China or Japan. I had an English teacher from Norway and he spoke as a native English speaker. That's really interesting because my other teachers were native English speakers from the USA and the UK.
learningEnglish   Wed Oct 29, 2008 6:01 pm GMT
Hey,

I would like to add my two cents here.
I don't know whether this endeavor is a realistic one or not. However, I've been working really hard on my pronunciation for quite a lot of time now (3-4 years) and two days ago, I called an American guy via voice chat and he was like "Are you American?".
Then, I called a British girl and she was convinced that I had an American mom or dad.
I'm not gifted or anything so maybe with loads of hard work you can pass for a native speaker for a few minutes.
Jasper   Wed Oct 29, 2008 6:17 pm GMT
☝ Maybe you're more gifted than you think. :-)
guest2   Thu Oct 30, 2008 9:06 pm GMT
The answer to the question is YES.

I've met a number of people who were born elsewhere, who came to the U.S. as adults, and spoke English so close to native pronunciation that one had to be told that they were foreign born.

A good ear obviously helps, but hard work and motivation seem to be the keys. Consider the following:

There was an experiment where American, adult (some middle-aged) English speakers were picked to learn Mandarin and Japanese. (Average folks, no special language screening.) They were given intensive pronunciation practice, BEFORE they even started on the rest of the language. Recordings were made of their speech, and played for native language Mandarin and Japanese teachers, who didn't know of the student's identities. 10 out of 10 Japanese learners, and 9 out of 10 Mandarin learners, were judged by the teachers to be native speakers!

Also, as has been mentioned elsewhere in a thread, there were prisoners-of-war in World War II who learned German well enough to pass as natives when they escaped. Talk about motivation!
Another Guest   Fri Nov 07, 2008 5:05 am GMT
There's definitely the issue of what phonemes a language uses. Apparently, Chinese doesn't have voiced consonants at the end of words, because Chinese people tend to simply drop voiced consonants, or change them to unvoiced consonants. Americans seem to have real trouble with the Spanish "a". They usually pronounce it like the "a" in "rat", or, even worse, like the "u" in "rut".

Norse languages don't have quite the same phonemes, but it's close, and what differences there are, Americans interpret as "cute" or "exotic", so Swedes have it easy in the accent department.
Randy   Sat Nov 08, 2008 10:10 pm GMT
In my country there are lots of call centers that are hiring people who speak English. For example, a multinational company like Hewlett Packard has around 3000 employees here. These people spend all day answering phone calls from Americans. It is called outsourcing services. My point is that people who have an intermediate-advanced level of English and they are at level 2 of pronunciation skill (pleasant but no-native) become very fluent and having a near-native accent after a few months. It seems that this is an effective way of improving pronunciation. Perhaps what most serious English learners need is to work in a call center environment for one or two years to reach an impressive change in their pronunciation. Maybe, this kind of job is one of the most modern ways of achieving a near-native pronunciation. Also employees are motivating because they're earning good money.
choose   Sun Nov 09, 2008 6:52 am GMT
"These people spend all day answering phone calls from Americans. It is called outsourcing services."

The World is Flat
CollinDove   Sun Nov 09, 2008 8:47 am GMT
"In my country there are lots of call centers that are hiring people who speak English. For example, a multinational company like Hewlett Packard has around 3000 employees here. These people spend all day answering phone calls from Americans. It is called outsourcing services. My point is that people who have an intermediate-advanced level of English and they are at level 2 of pronunciation skill (pleasant but no-native) become very fluent and having a near-native accent after a few months. "

Randy, assuming you're referring to outsourcing in India, this drives Americans nuts. No matter what you think, the people who answer the phones are difficult to understand and are nowhere near native fluency. It's probably the single biggest thing that customers complain about.

Where you got the idea that the answerers spoke "near-native English" is a mystery.