The Dark Side (wahahahaaa!) of wanting to Sound Like a Native Speaker

[Cainntear]

Anyway... on to the topic of the thread:

I've watched the video and I'm not really impressed.

Her delivery is extremely polished and very professional, but the message is pretty weak.

She spends a long time telling us about her history and what she did wrong. Then three quarters of the way in she starts summarising what she's already said, and then says she's going to give us some advice. However, her advice is mostly what not to do, with very little said on what we should really do -- she just gives vague platitudes that wouldn't look out of place in a self-help book like "find your own voice" and "exploring who you are in English". How do you do that?

I do not try to speak like a native speaker -- I try to speak as comprehensibly as I can. I do not know what deviations from the standard phonology will break comprehension, so I simply try to avoid all of them. I am not trying to sound like a native speaker, but I just recognise that copying native speakers is necessary to sound good... and I end up being mistaken for native speakers.

She talked about her own obsessive desire to be like a native and her feeling of failure when she did something wrong, and instead of just saying not to fixate that way, she essentially said not to even try.

She was also talking about identity, and saying that she was wanting to assume an identity that wasn't hers -- its OK to have an identify as a foreigner, because you are one.
Well yes, but then there's also a much subtler thing of getting an identity as an outsider an "other". I don't want to be a native, but I do want to be seen as part of the group.

When I was starting out on the whole language learning thing, I hung around with a group that was pretty international -- Spanish, French, Italian and Polish. They would kiss each other on the cheek, and I didn't because that wasn't "my identity". However, I quickly came to feel like I was pushing myself to the edge of the group.I realised that my body language was simply that -- a language. For me to express my identity as a friendly guy, I had to adopt their body language. If I behaved like was normal in my culture, I would be acting in a way that to them looked distant and stand-offish.

At the time I was actively thinking about accent, because there was part of me that was reluctant to lose my own personal accent. I was viewing it as my "face", and thinking about how I should have the same face in every language, but I realised that it was the same as the kissing thing: the voice isn't my face, but a medium through which I express myself. If I want to give the listener the same impression of myself, I had to express that impression through different means.

Then there's how she talks about different perceptions of different people, and she's ignoring a very important point there, because at one point she was talking about non-natives vs natives. A non-native might hear two distinct phonemes as a single phoneme, so they don't perceive a difference, but a native absolutely does. She picked a terrible example and gave no explanation of the real problem: trying to learn an accent without understanding the underlying phonology is never going to work.

She also quite bizarrely starts talking about how wonderful and interesting it is when people calque idiomatic expressions into their new language.
???
That just leaves people having the air of the chicken that found the knife.

[Le Baron]

Ah, so you did want to watch it after all. I can see it has brought up many things...

That just leaves people having the air of the chicken that found the knife.

This is not an idiom with which I'm familiar.

[Cainntear]

Ah, so you did want to watch it after all. I can see it has brought up many things...

That just leaves people having the air of the chicken that found the knife.

This is not an idiom with which I'm familiar.

Quad erat demonstrandum.

French: "Tu as l'air d'une poule qui a trouvé un couteau."

It's about being totally flummoxed and not understanding. It's far more colourful than the English to "have a blank look".

(Sorry -- flipped my definite and indefinite articles because I was going from memory on the hyperliteral translation and I looked up the genuine thing only for this post.)

[manishkumar1]

I can relate to that feeling of missing out until a video surfaces. It's surprising how often "nobody told her" becomes a recurring theme!

[Le Baron]

It's very difficult for language-learners to accept that the only learners who really end up 'sounding native' (because they practically are) are children. Everything else is becoming a more capable actor.

A confusion in this thread is that this is somehow equal to promoting the idea of not bothering about good pronunciation. It's not. Good pronunciation can be taught, and learned, though it differs per person. This is not the same as 'sounding native' and nothing like 'being native'. Which is in fact a cherished goal of a lot of people. When they're honest with themselves and care to admit it.

Unfortunately living in a complete fantasy world seems to be par for the course in language learning as much as elsewhere.

[Iversen]

I don't think I sound like a native speaker in any language except (maybe) Danish, but if I stayed for a long time somewhere abroad I think I would get better with time along some imagined asymptotic curve. But I do believe that it is possible to change erroneous pronunciation habits one by one if you get precise information AND the opportunity to listen to natives representing one dialect - namely the one the explanations explained. But I also think that people rarely get that kind of precise (and correct) information. Maybe it is just one little thing that should be changed, but native speakers don't have a clue about the way they speak because everything is too easy for them. And professional teachers may be too limited to the things they can read in their books and whatever their own teachers told them, but they ought at least to know something about phonology.

One example (from something that isn't a target language for me - yet): Finnish. I believed for a long time that ä would sound as in Swedish and German. Nope, it sounds like a flat a - and now I always hear that flat a in my head when I see a Finnish name with the letter ä. But all other Finnish sounds could still be way off. It just took the correct bit of information and a conscious decision to change that habit.

Right now I'm studying both Czech and (sometimes) Polish, and there is a Czech letter which is said to be extremely difficult for foreigners: their ř (as in řeka, river). But I have tried to find out what distinguishes it from the rz in Polish rzeka, and to me they sound the same, so I would pronounce the same if I tried. So far I don't even try to speak any of those languages (except in my head), but if I knew exactly what to listen for I might be able to hear it. And if I knew the corresponding mouth positions I might even be able to produce the two sounds in each its own idiomatic way. But I simply don't hear enough and know enough and train enough to do that now.

And one important thing is to believe the things you are told in the beginning (you have to start somewhere!), but at a certain point you discover that things aren't necessarily as you are told. I have for instance once listened to a certain diftong spoken by Dutch (And maybe also Flemish) speakers. I knew what to expect, but none of them said the sound combination I had read would be the only correct one (I think the diftong was "ui", but I'm no longer sure). And when I studied French I was told that nasal ã corresponded to non-nasal a. Bah- it doesn't - at least not in my idiolect. Ye Frenchophones might try a little test: put a finger between your front teeth and say a (as in "dalle") .. and then pull the velar back without moving your finger or teeth or tongue - and then say a nasal wovel. Wouldn't that wovel be the one in "dinge" rather than the one in "dent"? But that's not what I was told...

The key to hearing the right things is to listen for phones, NOT phonemes. Phonemes are only relevant when you want to focus on meanings, but it's the phones that count when you go for pronunciations ... plus some practical training of course.

[Le Baron]

And one important thing is to believe the things you are told in the beginning (you have to start somewhere!), but at a certain point you discover that things aren't necessarily as you are told. I have for instance once listened to a certain diftong spoken by Dutch (And maybe also Flemish) speakers. I knew what to expect, but none of them said the sound combination I had read would be the only correct one (I think the diftong was "ui", but I'm no longer sure). And when I studied French I was told that nasal ã corresponded to non-nasal a. Bah- it doesn't - at least not in my idiolect. Ye Frenchophones might try a little test: put a finger between your front teeth and say a (as in "dalle") .. and then pull the velar back without moving your finger or teeth or tongue - and then say a nasal wovel. Wouldn't that wovel be the one in "dinge" rather than the one in "dent"? But that's not what I was told...

The key to hearing the right things is to listen for phones, NOT phonemes. Phonemes are only relevant when you want to focus on meanings, but it's the phones that count when you go for pronunciations ... plus some practical training of course.

This is indeed most interesting, and I think demonstrates the difference between building some kind of conscious model of sound as compared to the unconscious acquisition of one. The first often fails for reasons you mention above - a lack of "precise (and correct) information." But also general mishearing, and the simple inability to reproduce 'authentic' sounds. But it isn't just pronunciation, it is ways and patterns of speaking. Word choices, particular stresses and prosody, cultural information and things left out as well as what is in. All of these belong to your life having to be lived through a language and even more so if it is the language in which a person initiated communication.

Few to no second language learners achieve this.

[Cainntear]

It's very difficult for language-learners to accept that the only learners who really end up 'sounding native' (because they practically are) are children. Everything else is becoming a more capable actor.

Yes, but if you're a good enough actor to sound like a native, you still sound like a native -- it is not an either/or situation.

A confusion in this thread is that this is somehow equal to promoting the idea of not bothering about good pronunciation.

A confusion in this thread is you thinking that the video is unambiguously saying what you believe to be true.

It's not.

Ditto.

Good pronunciation can be taught, and learned, though it differs per person.

The video does not talk about that at all. It doesn't explicitly say not to learn good pronunciation, but interpretation of that will of course differ from person to person. You personally assume that because it doesn't explicitly say something that goes against your subjective beliefs of language learning that (a) she doesn't think the thing that utterly disagrees with you and (b) no-one with half a brain would think she was actively against the thing that you subjectively believe to be the truth.

This is not the same as 'sounding native' and nothing like 'being native'. Which is in fact a cherished goal of a lot of people. When they're honest with themselves and care to admit it.

No indeed, but Stephanie is absolutely throwing the baby out with the bathwater on this one. She giving platitudes anout expressing your identity and finding your voice. She is actively talking against learning how to pronounce well. Hell, as I said, she's even talking about the calquing of your native-language idioms as part of expressing yourself in your new language.

Reductio ad absurdum: should a French kid calque the expression "j'ai onze ans" to "I have 11 years"...?

Now I'm not saying we should be afraid of idiomatic errors, but I think Michel Thomas put this best: if you serve a ball in tennis and it hits the net, you get a chance to serve again. If you get a word or an idiom wrong, it's just the same: the other person will look a bit confused, so just try again.

Stefanie is pitching herself as an "English coach", and there's nothing on her site talking about any qualifications. She's selling her video lessons with lines like this:
"As a native English speaker from California, I spent a lot of time learning a foreign language myself with traditional methods that didn’t work and left me feeling more confused than confident…"
She's basically throwing out everything about language teaching and doing the same old "revolutionary" "real-world" schtick as everyone else who's defining themselves as a "coach" instead of a "teacher", and I'm guessing the "coach" thing extends to more meaningless self-help platitudes.

As I said, she shows her own naivety when talking about people telling you you sound like a native speaker -- she compared classmates and natives, and didn't even mention that the classmates don't actually know what natives sound like... that's a pretty fundamental flaw.

Unfortunately living in a complete fantasy world seems to be par for the course in language learning as much as elsewhere.

What, like living in a fantasy word where you keep believing that people agree with you, and then blowing your top at someone whose views on language learning are much more similar to your own because they disagree with the person who in reality you fundamentally disagree with but in your fantasy world is expressing your own thoughts...?

[Cainntear]

The key to hearing the right things is to listen for phones, NOT phonemes. Phonemes are only relevant when you want to focus on meanings, but it's the phones that count when you go for pronunciations ... plus some practical training of course.

Hmmm... I disagree with that.

I used to say "I don't care about accent -- I only care about phonology".

My problem with the likes of Pimsleur is that it focused on accent, which means focusing on phones. I had classmates in Spanish that would ask "which D is that? dd or th?" They weren't accepting that it was the same phoneme, and that if you pronounce it the same, you will hear it the same. At the time, I'd already done linguistics (unlike most of the class) so I understood the concept of allophones, and I was seeing it as secondary, because native speakers don't even notice which allophone they're using. So I was speaking with the dental D and I was trying to get the [ð] phone naturally as a "lazy pronunciation of the /d/ phoneme, because that was how I was viewing it from the linguistics perspective: English has clear consonants and weak vowels (hence the number of schwa phones) and Spanish has clear vowels and weak consonants (hence the lenition of many consonants in intervocalic positions or similar). Allophones in most languages are just a side-effect of speaking quickly: if you get the phoneme's idealised phone right, then when you speak quickly you will likely start to approximate the weak allophone right too.

[Le Baron]

Yes, but if you're a good enough actor to sound like a native, you still sound like a native -- it is not an either/or situation.

You would say that though, because you imagine you sound like a native in several languages learned in adulthood. Pro tip: never be the judge of your own competence in this. It never ends well.

A confusion in this thread is you thinking that the video is unambiguously saying what you believe to be true.

Actually in the post you're quoting I wasn't referring to the video at all. I was offering my own view.

I've written about 55 words above this, so you have at least that many to now quote in isolation and comment negatively upon at great length.