Pronunciation Criticism
- Thread starter Pacifica
- Start date
I think there might be something to that, although I don't know if it applies in this case. I feel I can better understand poorly-pronounced French or Arabic if it's coming from an English speaker, than I can from others. I suspect it's because the mispronunciations are made in the direction of my native language, as it were, and not toward an even more foreign phonology.
But, if I'm correct in assuming you know no Turkish or whatever language they speak in Malaysia, you wouldn't really know what to expect from those speakers.
Glad to hear haha
For the tone part, it seems using the shadowing technique worked well enough. If I had to produce tones only from pinyin, I'd have a hard time I think, but here it was just like figuring out a song by ear, which is mainly how I learned to play the guitar so I had some experience!
An Egyptian friend just sent me this video of an American spokesman for the US State Department speaking crazily fast Arabic:
I think you have a point here, we are probably less sensitive to the influences of our own native language on the foreign language being spoken than to that of other languages, which leaps out at us.
That said when I hear Pacifica, I don't think it would be possible to figure out where she is from. But again maybe I'm phonetically biased.
And this is how they learn it naturally! I'm sure you'd be able to produce very convincing Chinese in no time if you ever decide to learn it!Glad to hear haha
For the tone part, it seems using the shadowing technique worked well enough. If I had to produce tones only from pinyin, I'd have a hard time I think, but here it was just like figuring out a song by ear, which is mainly how I learned to play the guitar so I had some experience!
Following on that logic, I can better understand a Frenchman's English for instance, when they use the stereotypical French accent (mostly unadulterated French phonemes, and no stress) than when they're trying to speak with a "good" accent. Of course, it depends on that person's proficiency.
It's been on my list forever lol I'm pretty sure one day I'll give it a go!
That would be strange, because my native language is apparent when I speak English (which, needless to say, I know much better than Arabic).
But in English you have all those vowel glides and overall melodic lines, which are never a problem in MSA since it's no one's mother tongue and each country has its own habits in terms of intonation. I've just heard your recording again and really you could be from any country that uses non-glide vowels and non-breathy plosives (if that's the right word, I'm thinking of b p t k etc.)
Zisse ize notte surprise-íng!
Vowel glides that we don't even know we're doing, of course. Melody is one of the hardest things to get right in another language.
It's sometimes easy to figure out what a mispronouncing fellow Francophone is saying, but actually not always. I remember a few occasions when my mother asked me "What does [insert terribly Frenchified English] mean?" and I was like "What...? How do you spell that, please?"
That certainly happened to me too a few times. Although proficiency does play a role in that as well: if two people are using the "stereotypical French accent" (which is probably too vague an expression to use), but one of them has a good idea how words are pronounced in English, they might choose a more adequate French phoneme to represent the original one, for instance.
Here's an example: the different pronunciations of <ea> sometimes lead to terrible mistakes. For instance, I remember a friend saying something that sounded like "greet", except the word he had in mind was "great".
For me the biggest difference between the sound of English and French are vowels and rhythm. Both languages have quite rich vowel systems but there's not a lot of overlap. I feel like this guy, for example, does all right with the actual pronunciations, but he has no idea of the rhythm or melody of French.