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My Accent
People say my accent is really bad. Can somebody tell me what exactly I should work on?
Also, can you guess my native language? :) http://media.putfile.com/my-accent-28
The audio quality of your recording isn't so good; your voice kept going in and out. But from what I could hear, your accent and cadence sounded Filipino.
Your accent really wasn't that bad. I understood you perfectly. What should you work on? Well, first of all, what is your goal? To sound like a native American English speaker? Since I'm not a phonetics expert, I'll leave it the regulars on this forum to advise you, but the main things I noticed about your recording is a) absense or near absense of schwa b) incomplete rounding of vowels; c) [f] instead of [v] in 'leave' (which sounded like 'lif'); d) [s] instead of [z] in 'years'; e) the rhythm of your reading was a little off, a bit too staccato.
Thanks for your suggestions.
Yes, my goal is to speak more like a native American, and no, I'm not Filipino. Here's another voice clip (though it still lacks the quality): http://media.putfile.com/sonnet-29
I think it's very good. A few of the departures from a more or less general American accent I could find were:
sonnet ["san@t] instead of ["sAn@t] (regional in the US) nine [nain] with a close second element eyes [aIs] instead of [aIz] the /l/ in "all alone" could be darker featured sounded like ["viSr\d] to me man [m@n] instead of [m{n] (perhaps an over reaction to a previous comment??) in these thoughts -> dental plosives instead of [D] and [T] (this happens in a couple of other places, again this is regional in the US) it seems you have [INg] in "arising"
Well, your intonation/rhythm seems to be off.
I think you are using syllable-timed rhythm, while English has stress-timed intonation/rhythm patterns. You should work on that. From wiki: ''In every language, speech emission is based on a sequence of elementary sound units; some of them play a specific part: through their isochronic recurrence, they produce the rhythm of the sentences. In a syllable-timed language, these rhythm units are syllables. However, such a classification should be used carefully, a spoken language being less settled than a written language ; thus the way the rhythm is produced may vary from one region to another, or with time. Spanish, Italian, French and Catalan are examples of syllable-timed languages. Romance languages are generally syllable-timed. An exception is European Portuguese, which is stress-timed. Brazilian Portuguese is syllable-timed. All Indian languages, such as Hindi, Sanskrit, Tamil, Punjabi, etc are also syllable-timed languages. Korean and Chinese are also syllable-timed languages.''
Kess, could you tell me details about syllable-timed language and stress-timed language? I've never heard of them. Thanks.
English, German, Dutch, Slavic languages, European Portuguese are typical stress timed languages. Stress-timing is also called Morse-code rhythm.
Spanish, French, Brazilian Portuguese are commonly quoted as examples of syllable-timed languages. This type of rhythm was originally metaphorically referred to as 'machine-gun rhythm' because each underlying rhythmical unit is of the same duration, similar to the transient bullet noise of a machine-gun.
You can hear it here:
an English speaker (English is stress timed) trying to speak Brazilian Portuguese (BrPortuguese is syllable-timed) http://www.sk.com.br/sk-reduc.html
From that site:
''According to Dauer: In order to achieve a good rhythm in English, you need to slow down, stretch out, and very clearly pronounce one-syllable content words and the stressed syllables of longer words. And you must reduce unstressed function words and other unstressed syllables. (85) A common error made by non-native speakers of English is pronouncing one-syllable content words too quickly, without the necessary stress. But an even more common error made by non-native speakers whose mother tongue is syllable-timed is not reducing function words and other unstressed syllables enough. With regards to this problem, Dauer adds: As a result, the listener will have difficulty perceiving which syllables are stressed and which are unstressed. Since stress is the main cue to word boundaries in spoken language (equivalent to spaces in written language), the listener will therefore have problems figuring out where words begin and end. It is extremely important to make a clear difference between stressed and unstressed syllables when you are speaking English. (85)''
>>As a result, the listener will have difficulty perceiving which syllables are stressed and which are unstressed. Since stress is the main cue to word boundaries in spoken language (equivalent to spaces in written language), the listener will therefore have problems figuring out where words begin and end. It is extremely important to make a clear difference between stressed and unstressed syllables when you are speaking English. (85)''<<
It should be emphasized that, if one is to be speaking North American English, vowel length allophony on top of vowel length differences caused by stress variation is quite important, and is very commonly missed by non-native speakers. The matter is that, while it is not phonemic, it is still rather important with respect to actual word recognition in practice. (At least for me, if someone gets the vowel lengths wrong in words, it is often hard to understand what they are saying, and in particular such makes it hard to properly perceive following obstruents.)
My native tongue is also one of the stress-timed languages, according to your excerpts, so I can´t be using syllable-timed rhythm.
The Dauer part was interesting, good advice.
What'sinaname, you sound like those Polish guest workers we have. Are you from one of the Slavic countries?
Yeah, I'm one of those Polish plumbers plundering through Europe :)
You're right though, the country is Slavic. |