Can anyone attain a near-native accent?

Matthew   Mon Nov 10, 2008 5:30 am GMT
An absolute native accent would be hard to achieve, and for most nearly impossible, but a close approximation shouldn't be.
Sam   Thu Nov 20, 2008 6:46 am GMT
Honestly, I think they are more disadvantaged for the fact that everybody speaks their language. They miss so much of the fun of coping with the language and spirit of a different culture. And if you take it for granted that everybody speaks your language (by the way, it is not completely true), it may result in some nasty turns of mind I would better not like to partake of. By the way, it was nobody's official decision to make English the most widespread international language in the world, it just happened that due to extensive colonisation English came to be the language the most used as a second language by non-natives. And once this happened, it exists independently of any English-speaking culture, having a life of its own. As it happens, more and more people are likely to communicate in fluent English exclusively with non-natives, without having ever met a native English speaker.
CollinDove   Fri Nov 21, 2008 6:23 pm GMT
I wonder if this would work for the purposes of learning English to a native level?

http://snipurl.com/68t3w
Xie   Sat Nov 22, 2008 1:08 pm GMT
>>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.

Every Chinese novice chops out syllables of an average European language. They say distinguish when they mean distinguished/distinguish/distinguishes, and strictforwere when they mean straightforward. They don't just devoice (in a way similar to some Germans and Dutch), they also delete consonant clusters.

And because devoicing/unvoiced consonants are more popular now among the average Chinese (Mandarin has very few voiced consonants; there are more in Teochew.... but everybody knows Mandarin is most popular)... so the general advice for Chinese speakers (almost synonymous to ethnic Chinese in China...) is always, always remind them of voiced consonants. Our strength, though, is twofold: 1) remembering the spelling, since Chinese should be the strongest language learners in the visual department... we outdo the Japanese in the Hanzi department... so spelling shouldn't be a problem at all for many of us (having that said, since we delete consonants so often... that's a downside), and 2) we also have diphthongs, so we speak diphthongs better than the French novice... and list goes on...
Xie   Sat Nov 22, 2008 1:28 pm GMT
>>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.

Again, I'd take Prof AA's advice for granted. "Work" involves phonetic and phonological analysis (in his words, reading description, in fact, but I use analysis myself), and extensive shadowing. But in general, even when talking to a true native, I can't help but maintain some distance from his/her native accent... that has sth to do with language sovereignty and ...some sort of respect. Personally, I think it'd be both too aggressive and stilted to try to speak native-like, because that could upset both of us, and it could be like showing-off. I also find it weird to think I'm Anglophone (so to speak) when I speak English.... or even "white", "American", or "northern Chinese" for Mandarin (The list goes on).

It's perfectly OK to shadow audio material (i.e. voice in a machine, not in a human being, and not talking to a person) until you acquire a very very good accent (i.e. native-like), but I think it's recommendable to maintain your own idiolect, since 1) I don't shadow just one voice, I also shadow female voices and different regional accents, so I should have my own (southern Chinese, male, young) too and 2) like antimoon guys say, I don't want to speak just like someone else (and usually THAT particular person, and in my case, a particular adult male), I must speak "like" myself, or to be precise, I must be myself.

However, to be myself is compatible with acquiring a native-like accent. For a very accent-diverse language like English, or one of its models, American English, for example, I find it beneficial, as usual, to shadow multiple voices, with different emphasis. By emphasis I mean, again, that some are for understanding and NOT total imitation, while some are for true production (imitation). In my case, even though I find that American women usually speak with a very very very attractive accent (and I do see a lot of their Hong Kong counterparts also try to imitate this exact model, perhaps thx to the popular American TV series in my city), I simply can't imitate this sort of accent; instead, an average young American GUY would be a good model for AVERAGE conversations, while... Steve Ember could be very good for my "Chinese-style" formal speech in American English.
Xie   Sat Nov 22, 2008 1:43 pm GMT
And no PC, plz, the above shows quite a lot about my own preference - I mean it, at least I myself learn a spoken language, and to speak it fluently, for social needs, somehow. At least for my life now, if I ever want to acquire an American accent, a good, casual model, which should occupy most of my daily speech in English, should be a young, white American guy in his 20s. No female, no other (supposedly non-native/immigrant) accents, no accent of more mature people, and so on.

But at least for myself, there must be some imagined identity lurking in my foreign speech; at least for now, my English speech is even more high-pitched .... perhaps in the wrong stress as a guy... than my Chinese speech, which may have sounded stilted for some locals already... I'm afraid. But that's that, before I can speak maturely "like" that American guy above.

And even in my case, acoustic quality also comes into play. My voice is rather high-pitched (tho still far higher than some really sissy guys out there... I'm quite straight) and soft (my throat soars very easily, and I can't a lot of fried/spicy stuff unlike most foreigners and northern/southwestern Chinese).... so some accents are simply too difficult/too strong to imitate. In my memory, most black people (American) have a "hard" voice, so I can't do their accent - I'm just not the right person for it, and it's too hard to do.