How to Master an Accent

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/23/theater/how-to-master-an-accent.html?_r=0

by Thevet • 10 years ago

279 105 10 years ago

nytimes.com

mysterypie• 10 years ago

If you want to also see her while she does the accents, this TED talk is great:

https://www.ted.com/talks/sarah_jones_as_a_one_woman_global_...

apendleton• 10 years ago

For a later TED she also did an excerpt of the play this article is about (so, more accents!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAK1UIb-Fio

wallflower2• 10 years ago

On the subject of accents, in case you missed her viral video the first-time around, the absolutely astounding Saara from Finland.

"What Languages Sound Like To Foreigners" https://youtu.be/ybcvlxivscw

laurieg2• 10 years ago

That is a wonderful video. The gibberish she speaks in Each language sounds pretty convincing, although I noticed my relationship with each language affected how it sounded a lot.

French and Spanish: I've heard them around but never spoken them. She sounded perfect.

Swedish: I used to be able to speak it but have forgotten. She sounded even more convincing than in French.

Japanese: I speak it now but not natively. She sounded pretty rough and not all that Japanese to me.

English: My native language. My brain tried so hard to make sense of it and pulled out snippets of words but there was no grammar there.

flojito• 10 years ago

Spanish native here: the Spanish that speaks in this video is like an American Spanish with and scent of Italian accent :-) But a very fluent one.

sundvor2• 10 years ago

As a Norwegian, who grew up with a plethora region specific accents in my own country, then moved to Australia, I love this.

In her next video, she completely nailed the (female version of the) Australian English. Really had to laugh out loud at how she captured that essence. Genius.

Edit: It's certainly not the only one, all Australian females don't sound like this; it's just that she got this particular version of the Australian ones so right. I'm actually somewhat confused as to how to place it; back home you'd have the geographical regions and that's it. So I wonder if this Australian one is more of a "sociolect". If anyone has any info / pointers I'd love to learn more.

tricolon2• 10 years ago

Finnish: (my first, heritage language) Had the right set of phonemes and the right pace of speech, but no discernible meaning. It confounded me and would have irritated me had it been longer.

English: (my second, dominant language) See above.

And for languages with which I only have a passing familiarity...

Swedish, Estonian, French: Pretty convincing.

Portuguese: A bit off the mark. Sounded almost like Italian.

Japanese: Only sort-of convincing.

Spanish (Castilian): Her stress placement seemed a little off but most of the vowels were good. Sort of an Americanized version.

wingerlang2• 10 years ago

I'm Swedish and it is very convincing, some sentences are pretty much all real words (I might be finding words where she didn't actually say them though) but the meaning is not there.

For fun I tried to transcribe it.

----

Asså de e ju man svarta man handlar jua

Filen man råd ostaglig kämpare

Me de sju mat trämpar me alla pluva som fan

Dessa fjortare plådar oss mot en botande mas hemma

---

wtbob• 10 years ago

English: My native language. My brain tried so hard to make sense of it and pulled out snippets of words but there was no grammar there.

As an English speaker with a bit of German, that's how Dutch sounds to me: it sounds like English, only wrong somehow. I feel that if I just focused a bit harder, or they'd enunciate more clearly, I'd understand it.

Hooray for languages!

wenderen• 10 years ago

Her Hindi sounds very very different from the real thing.

sjwright• 10 years ago

She annotated the video to acknowledge that it does sound more like Tamil than Hindi.

gotofritz2• 10 years ago

I found the Italian with the stereotypical moving hands incredibly annoying

jpatokal2• 10 years ago

And she's pretty good at actually speaking languages as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_19688...

...and note that she's genuinely fluent in only 3 of those!

sangnoir• 10 years ago

There's a fantastic English-sounding song by an italian singer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8 Prisencolinensinainciusol by Adriano Celentano. It hurts my brain when I try to pick out meaning from the phenomes.

nkrisc• 10 years ago

I love this song. I had always wondered what (American) English sounds like to people who don't understand it. As a native speaker I thought I couldn't know, but when I heard this song I did!

Eiriksmal• 10 years ago

The Sims 2 Maxis audio director [0] went all-in on beefing up Simlish to freakishly mirror English--the same phonemes, only scrambled up into gibberish. When sang with convincing emotion and inflection, it sounds quite incredible and has you nodding along without even realizing the lyrics are completely fabricated.

The Humble Brothers produced most of the Simlish tracks in the mid 00s and have an album of their impressive songs available on iTunes. "Upside" is a fine example.[1]

[0] https://www.cnet.com/news/simlish-singing-the-music-behind-t...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ty66tLNus1E

_samihasan_2• 10 years ago

Her pronunciation of Arabic is off a little bit.

She just crammed the Semitic sounds in a few made up words sparkled by some real Arabic words and that's it but she should have been making more effort in imitating the rhythm and intonation (prosody) [1] to fool the native Arabic speaker ears that what she speaks was actually Arabic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosody_%28linguistics%29

sethammons2• 10 years ago

An english gibberish song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VsmF9m_Nt8. I could not find the original that I heard, but this is most of it. Hilarious.

Rzor• 10 years ago

Wow. This is really hard. I like to play a Russian accent for fun and would like to improve it, but I guess I'll stay with YouTube channels to do that.

laurieg2• 10 years ago

Does anyone have any advice on how to hear the distinction in sounds that aren't in your native language? For example an English speaker learning Chinese tones or a Japanese speaker learning L and R differences. It seems like this is a huge wall to learning accents.

dragonwriter• 10 years ago

There are books (and, better but more expensive, teachers) that address directly the mechanics (e.g., tongue, lip, etc., positions) of making the sounds.

In essence, bypass hearing the difference (that comes later, through use) and skip straight to making the sounds.

Probably works better for unfamiliar phonemes than tones, though. Different issues entirely.

stevekemp• 10 years ago

This is something I struggled with, and I think the only thing that helped for me is a) immersion and b) time.

I moved to Finland and couldn't differentiate between ö and o for the longest time. But after living here for a year it became easier.

wallflower2• 10 years ago

I haven't done their courses but check out the Mimic Method. It is an intriguing way at learning a language that focuses on the IPA-based sounds in that language.

http://mimicmethod.com

nyando• 10 years ago

Interesting, I've noticed that this is how I tend to learn languages too. When I moved to Switzerland I picked up the accent by always listening to my friends talk or watching Swiss videos on YouTube, then repeating the sounds back to myself.

xiaoma3• 10 years ago

Yes. Do a lot of listening and do minimal pair drills. I don't think Chinese tones are that tough, but it can take a long time to train the ears when the actual sounds of the language are different, e.g. Taiwanese where there are aspirated, plain and voiced versions of a bunch of consonants. Basically k/g of English mapped to 3 different consonants, as did p/b, t/d, etc.

This drove me nuts when I was learning: https://toshuo.com/2010/the-hardest-thing-about-taiwanese-ph...

zhte4152• 10 years ago

I know nothing about Taiwanese pronunciation other than I probably know it when I hear it. :)

I agree. To add: The most useful advice I read, which I found useful, is stop caring about tones of individual words. Listen to the flow of sentences, correct own pronunciation of words that are wrong with some drilling, and focus on communication. Like English, speaking word-by-word (or, character-by-character) doesn't sound natural.

And also stop caring if you're met with an unfamiliar word. As long as you're focused on the sentence, it should be pretty obvious if it is a noun, verb, pronoun, or any other part of speech. Does it have material impact? If so, take a note and remember it.

Basically, stop translating what one hears. Just understand it.

drivers99• 10 years ago

Find recordings of "minimal pairs". Those are words where the only difference is a single sound that you are trying to distinguish. I have a book called "Fluent Forever" explaining about that, and the author sells sets of Anki flash cards to train on those minimal pairs for certain languages.

They're only about $12 (per language) on his web site here: https://fluent-forever.com/product/fluent-forever-pronunciat...

xiaoma3• 10 years ago

I always loved Robert Greene's story of when he was young and living in France he got hired at a hotel while he was pretending to be Irish. He talked about it in an interview that got a little into how much of a method acting exercise it became. He actually took the job and got sucked into an alternate identity for years!

https://youtu.be/vLXAZsCwGwM?t=9m54s

GuiA2• 10 years ago

Since many comments in this thread converge towards language pronunciation:

When people are learning how to draw, they typically have to learn how to "unsee". To quote Betty Edwards:

students beginning in art generally do not really see what is in front of their eyes — that is, they do not perceive in the way required for drawing. They take note of what's there, and quickly translate the perception into words and symbols mainly based on the symbol system developed throughout childhood and on what they know about the perceived object.

Learning how to pronounce sounds in a new language is the same. A lot of people will pronounce foreign words with how their brain thinks it should sound, using their native language as a baseline. The trick is to try to get rid of any phonetic preconception you might have, and pronounce sounds as you hear them from native speakers. It takes practice, but it's a learnable skill.

(Which is why romanization of Asian languages, for instance, is a trap for new learners: if you're learning Japanese, the latin alphabet should have no place whatsoever in your learning. It's a tempting, but false path)

For drawing like for speaking, kids are naturally good at this. (except while language acquisition happens naturally for kids, deliberate drawing practice rarely does)

joggery• 10 years ago

Indeed. And just as most people can't see things accurately, not can they sense what's going on inside their mouths. AFAICT each accent has a signature pattern of muscle tension and positioning of jaw, pharynx, etc.

yoz-y• 10 years ago

I agree with the idea but disagree about the romanisation part. There are many reasons why people should start with romanised versions first. The main reason is that one should concentrate on the language first and on complex writing later, otherwise there is too much information to process. The other reason is that any useful actual writing in those languages will be done in the romanised alphabet (i.e.: on a computer). The barrier of unlearning the pronunciation of different characters is no larger when learning Chinese pinyin while being english, than learning Slovak pronunciations of Latin letters while being French.

kobeya5• 10 years ago

With Japanese learners at least, you can tell with a great deal of accuracy whether someone used a romanization crutch or native script from the get-go based on how bad their accent is (anecdotal, but observation over many students). I'm don't know if this holds true of Chinese, though.

_samihasan_2• 10 years ago

I agree with you completely and I even developed an open -source writing system called Eskéndereyya [1] to help learners of Arabic in reading and pronunciation and to prepare them to make the jump to the Arabic script very confidently because I noticed that some beginners are put off by the notion of learning a completely new script just to read and write few sentences and when taking into account how usually Arabic is communicated in writing without diacritics, it becomes very frustrating for them to get any immediate return for their efforts to learn the language.

[1] https://github.com/samihasan/eskendereyya

curun1r• 10 years ago

A lot of people will pronounce foreign words with how their brain thinks it should sound, using their native language as a baseline. The trick is to try to get rid of any phonetic preconception you might have, and pronounce sounds as you hear them from native speakers. It takes practice, but it's a learnable skill.

There's actually a trick that, for me at least, makes this a lot easier. If I learn to speak English with a heavy accent of someone with a different native language, it will then be easier to transition into speaking that other language. It almost separates learning a new language from learning to pronounce that language.

The key is that it's a lot easier for me to hear and practice the sounds of a new language when I can hear the differences between my pronunciation and correct pronunciation and it's most easy to hear those differences in my native language. With enough practice on the accent, the rhythms, tongue positioning and overall mouth habits that the speaker I'm aping hasn't yet learned to drop become second nature such that when I transition over to speaking that other language, I already have correct habits.

As an English speaker, it's so easy to find YouTube clips of people who barely speak English to copy that I can learn to do a pretty convincing accent in an afternoon at this point, though it took take me a couple of days the first few times I tried it.

dharma12• 10 years ago

agree 100%. And can't recommend her (Betty Edwards') book enough. http://drawright.com/

I think this likely also works for perfect pitch - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3Cb1qwCUvI.

Neuroplasticity is very different for kids, but there are probably techniques that can enable learning like this with adults - just takes longer.

npgatech2• 10 years ago

Betty Edward's book is horrendously misleading to a serious artist. Her book rewards the user with false sense of skill - learn to draw what you see and not what you know. This is easy to do and she has garnered a tremendous support. Any serious artist who is seeking to truly learn how to draw must go through the fundamentals of construction and being able to draw the same thing from a different viewpoint/angle. Try that with Betty's book where one learns how to draw from a reference without understanding the structure. The reader gets to produce nice looking results, but they will miserably fail when asked to draw the same exact subject from a different angle. This indicates lack of fundamental understanding of how to transform 3D objects/scenes into 2D plane. One has to learn how to internalize the object and its structure before putting it down on paper. Betty's book also is riddled with pseudoscience and baseless claims of how the human brain works.

wodenokoto• 10 years ago

The romanisation part is ridiculous, but pops up all the time.

English and French spelling is as far removed from each other as anything. Anybody learning a foreign language will have to come to terms with the fact that the letters work slightly-to-moderately different for each language, whether those are European or Asian languages. Danish and Swedish are practically dialects of each other, but the spelling and pronunciation are miles apart. Trying to read one with the usage of the other will sound as stilted as any transliteration of any "non-alphabet" language.

Alphabet is the only official way to type out pronunciation of mainland Chinese, so trying to avoid the alphabet for Chinese is basically impossible.

Vietnamese, like several other Asian languages is Alphabet with diatrics, so again, you have to use Alphabet. There is nothing magical about Asian languages that gets contaminated by the Alphabet.

As for Japanese, the kana alphabet can be transcribed to Alphabet without information loss, so it is in no way a poor substitute. You also have to learn romanisations in order to type on a keyboard.

The bottom line is, you have to learn new sounds when learning a new language and you have to learn new spelling. shi in Japanese or Chinese are quite close to English, at least compared to how close ta is to the English pronunciation of "shi", so the alphabet acts as a nice mnemonic structure for learners.

skrebbel• 10 years ago

The way i understood the GP is that Japanese has the benefit of having its own writing system so you won't get so easily lured into mapping sounds to back your own (assumedly latin script based) language. Use that as an opportunity and avoid the Latin alphabet altogether.

When learning French you don't have that opportunity so you're going to keep having to remind yourself that not a single character in a French word sounds like what it does on your native language.

I've seen this in action when learning Finnish, a long time ago, in a class full of expats. Most Germans had serious trouble with the ä, which sounds entirely different in Finnish than in German. They would consistently pronounce it like in German, which made them sound ridiculous. The rest of the class, whose native language alphabet didn't contain the ä, got their pronunciation much closer to the real thing. I can only imagine how powerful this is if not a single character, but the entire script, is different from your native language.

jdietrich2• 10 years ago

Alphabet is the only official way to type out pronunciation of mainland Chinese, so trying to avoid the alphabet for Chinese is basically impossible.

Chinese schoolchildren learn Pinyin before they learn Hanzi. Romanisation is only a problem if you're under the false assumption that these letters mean what you think they mean. It isn't hard to internalise the idea that j, x and q represent completely alien sounds that you must learn to recognise and reproduce.

njwi332• 10 years ago

As for Japanese, the kana alphabet can be transcribed to Alphabet without information loss

Not quite true in reverse - lead and read, for example, would have the same kana but are different in english. That said, yeah I totally agree, there is nothing wrong with using the alphabet if you are mindful that there is a different phonetic 'mapping.'

stewbrew• 10 years ago

English and French spelling is as far removed from each other as anything.

English integrated many words from other languages, incl French -- due to migration, conquests etc. English people had the tendency to retain the original spelling but to pronounce the foreign words english. It is interesting to compare this to Spanish where, in many cases, foreign words are spelled differently but most often the original pronunciation is approximately retained.

jasode• 10 years ago

, and pronounce sounds as you hear them from native speakers. It takes practice, but it's a learnable skill.

This sounds plausible and I want it to be true but I have doubts that every phoneme of every world language can be discriminated by adults after the early-childhood language acquisition. (The so-called "critical period."[1]).

I think a fascinating example even within one language such as English is the "pin" vs "pen" pronunciation.[2]

And plenty of other 2nd-language learning examples such as English speakers missing the delicate "zh" sound in French "bonjour" and always pronouncing it with the hard "j" -- or trying to pronounce the Vietnamese "Nguyen" as "when" or "win". There's a (tonal) phoneme in Vietnamese that's nonexistent in English so it's very possible English listeners can't even hear it as a new distinct sound they have to replicate. The "when" or "win" is the closest approximation they will ever hear and because of that, they will always sound non-native.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period#Second_languag...

[2]https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/14y6tc/til_m...

acqq2• 10 years ago

It's really funny:

"In Alabama, both are pronounced "pee-uhn." People made fun of me when I first moved here for pronouncing pen as "pehn" and pin as, well "pin."

hawklawson: "Can I borrow a pehn?"

people: "Hahaha you need a 'pun'? Say it agin..."

And, to this day, when I'm scheduling appointments for patients over the phone...

hawklawson: "I have an opening for tehn o'clock."

people: "Huh? Whee-uhn j'you say?"

hawklawson: "I have an opening for tee-uhn a'clawk."

people: "Alrighty then put 'er down."

Source: I can turn my southern accent on and off."

And living for more than a decade in the country that simply can't produce some sounds of my mother's tongue, I catch myself having more problems voicing them. I know the difference but it's somehow harder, without the environment and the context. Somehow the tongue becomes almost numb to move like before.

dorfsmay• 10 years ago

I have doubts that every phoneme of every world language can be discriminated by adults after the early-childhood language acquisition

Based on my own experience of emigrating to a country using a different language than my native tongue, I think it can be done over time, but my understanding is that we use a different part of the brain for languages learned late in life.

panglott• 10 years ago

Wikipedia has very good resources on the International Phonetic Alphabet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...

But the question is why you would want to do that? No human can speak all the world's languages, or realistically more than a few languages. This article is about a woman who is performing only in English.

It is certainly true that non-native speakers can learn a language quite well, after years of immersion and studied effort. Personally I don't think it's impossible for language learners to achieve native-level competence; I just think the number of people who achieve higher levels of competence decreases exponentially.

jdietrich2• 10 years ago

This sounds plausible and I want it to be true but I have doubts that every phoneme of every world language can be discriminated by adults after the early-childhood language acquisition.

It's almost trivial if you're trained to listen rather than decode. Opera singers can achieve perfect pronunciation of languages they don't comprehend at all, through the use of IPA. The words are absolutely meaningless to them, they're just very precisely recreating a certain set of sounds. Their musical listening skills transfer directly into pronunciation.

If you can learn to sing Sygyt as an adult, I think you can cope with a couple of tricky phonemes in a foreign language.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_14pb2i6Sc

Like OP, I think that the comparison with visual art is very apt. Most people see on a functional level, identifying objects rather than seeing their literal forms. As a result, they tend to draw the abstract idea of a thing rather than the literal appearance of a thing. Learning to draw involves unlearning that windows are rectangular, that chairs have legs of equal length, that a soccer ball is spherical.

If we're primed to pay attention to one thing, it vastly diminishes our ability to recognise other things:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubNF9QNEQLA

emodendroket8• 10 years ago

(Which is why romanization of Asian languages, for instance, is a trap for new learners: if you're learning Japanese, the latin alphabet should have no place whatsoever in your learning. It's a tempting, but false path)

I don't really believe this. Spanish, French, English, and Swahili are all written in the same alphabet, but have wildly different pronunciations. There's nothing magical about using Roman letters (and I have a chip on my shoulder about this after studying Japanese because, while converting Japanese to a romanized system has actual sound arguments against it, "it would sound like English" is trotted out constantly even though it's nonsense).

55555• 10 years ago

I'll use Thai as an example because I speak/read/write Thai, but the following is also true for most other languages...

If you were raised speaking english, then the roman letters of the english alphabet have distinct pronounciations/sounds to you. They make these sounds in your head when you read them. Someone born in mexico will have a different alphabet, and heck even australians and British people have different sounds for their letters than Americans. Heck even Americans from different regions have different sounds.

The point is that Thai people make different noises when they speak. They do not have an "z" sound. Frankly, none of their sounds match up exactly to any of our sounds. When you spell thai words using the english alphabet, you will then tend to read the word back as you have written it, in English, and thus incorrectly. Thai letters have Thai sounds, so you should learn this second alphabet and then you can read thai words by making the correct thai sounds.

If a language has an official transliteration system, such as pinyin for Chinese, then it may possibly work, but you are still essentially learning a second alphabet, merely one with the same shaped letters. For languages like Thai though, there is no official transliteration, and making your own and using it consistently would be more difficult than simply learning the Thai alphabet, and infact would more or less require learning the Thai alphabet.

For an extreme example, consider that African language that has the clicky sounds. How would you even begin to remember how a word sounds if you were storing it in your brain as text after transliterating it into the English alphabet? "Click clack click clack" is not the correct pronunciation.

Edit: I re-read your comment and see that you speak Japanese. You are using roman-looking letters, but you are surely being very careful to read the letters using Japanese sounds. Given that an alphabet is a set of letters that represent phonemes, are you really using the English alphabet or have you created a second, phonetic Japanese alphabet that happens to have identical shapes?

eloisant• 10 years ago

Having learned Japanese as a native French speaker, I can guarantee you that it's true.

When French people learn English, they often fall into the trap of pronouncing it in a French way: the way they read it instead of how they hear it. There are many elements in the accent of French speakers in English that come from this.

If you use romanisation of a language like Japanese, you expose yourself to the same problem instead of learning directly with the original script. In addition, the most common romanisation of Japanese is designed to be readable by European language speakers (Hepburn) rather than just using the roman alphabet in a logical, direct application of the native script (Kunrei).

r_smart• 10 years ago

I'd also point out that my experience of taking a few semesters of Japanese was that it's pronunciation is very phonetical, at least compared to actual romance languages, which lends itself well to romanized representation. I actually found it easier than a course I started that purported to teach us to read French, but had no emphasis on the spoken language. I had no idea how the words were supposed to sound as I tried to read it, so I really struggled to read it. I dropped the course because the idea of learning a language without speaking it seemed stupid to me.

I would like to hear your arguments against romanization if you feel up for it.

grwgreg• 10 years ago

Polish is a great example of this. It looks like someone just mashed on the keyboard. There is a Polish mma fighter named Joanna Jedrzejczyk and no one has any clue how to say her last name.

Nadya3• 10 years ago

私の考えは君と異なります。

I disagree entirely. ローマ字 is a terrible trap for beginners and it does affect their pronunciation. It is why so many people struggle with the Japanese "r" and つ. It is why people pronounce "せんぱい" incorrectly. Do you see it romanized as "senpai" or "sempai"? Both of those differ greatly for beginners. It is why they learn 言う incorrectly. It is always romanized "iu" though it is pronounced "yuu" and unless you are told or are listening to how natives say it, you will learn it wrong.

Should ようこ be romanized as "yoko", "youko", or "yōko"? Would you read any of these differently from one another? The answer should be "yes" because よこ is not equivalent to ようこ but in some romanizations you will see them be equivalent.

It's a big wake up call when you visit Japan and realize you're completely illiterate outside of English signs (if you are in 京都 or 東京). If you did not study Kana you will not be able to read anything. My first recommendation for learners is to learn Kana and completely abandon romanizations entirely.

E: Speaking of 東京. Is it romanized "Tokyo" or "Toukyou"? Which of these do you think most people, including learners, see it as? Can you see how they end up pronouncing it incorrectly because of how it is romanized?

mrkgnao• 10 years ago

a doctor who uses homeopathic medicines, massage techniques and energy work

I wonder if there are any people who market homeopathy targeted at vocal training. How would that even work (I mean, in terms of similia similibus curentur or whatever)?

tatotato• 10 years ago

Error 503 Backend is unhealthy

Funniest one I've seen in a while.

Singletoned• 10 years ago

It's a bit weird for an interview titled "How to Master an Accent" to start with the quote:

“For me it’s not an accent. I know people who do brilliant accents. But I don’t know how to do that.”

gotofritz2• 10 years ago

Not really, it explains where she comes from - she doesn't think of an abstract accent, but of a person with that accent

Shorel2• 10 years ago

I think that's her way to explain that she doesn't try to use her own words with an accent (like most people would do), but she memorizes the sounds (think IPA) and mouth positions and tries to reproduce that as exactly as possible, even if in some cases the sound means another word in her own accent.

bkgunby• 10 years ago

As someone who learned to speak fluently in a different language, I believe the trick is to study the IPA of both your native language and the one you want to learn. This is especially true if you come from a language like English which isn't a phonetic language.

It sets a common ground for you to work with. There may be some vowels that may be undistinguishable for both native speakers. However, you'll likely to come across some that requires a developed ear to differentiate the two. This is the reason why you probably have an accent. Focus on tongue placement, emphasis, change in pitch, etc.

Of course, this won't help much to actually speak in a different language, but for accents I found this method incredibly helpful. It's the micro side of things that most people overlook.

vinay427• 10 years ago

As someone who is currently learning to speak in a different language, I would agree with this wholeheartedly. I learned IPA in a university course and have found it very useful for learning languages, especially because most native speakers of the target language may not be aware of the phonetics of that language.

dominotw• 10 years ago

the window of mastering an accent closes once you hit your late teens. After that your brain cannot hear the correct pronunciation and merely maps it to closest sounding sound in you mental library. Once you can't hear it, you can't speak it. It is much easier and useful to learn the "flow" of the language than trying to make new sounds .

People always use colin Farrell as an example of adults who mastered an accent but forget that his native language is phonetically close to the language he is supposedly mastering.

sethammons2• 10 years ago

I love accents and flavors of speech. A couple of thing I noticed when I was a bit younger. In California, words that end with "-ty" are pronounced "-dy." Eternity -> Eternidy. Also, In Southern California at least, you measure distance in time. "How far away is the store?", "about five minutes."

oxplot• 10 years ago

* Listen to a lot of radio/movies/shows

* Record own voice speaking passages of above material

* Play back, compare, adjust and repeat

Do above for countless hours

How to Master an Accent

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