Re: The Dark Side (wahahahaaa!) of wanting to Sound Like a Native Speaker
Posted: Fri Jan 10, 2025 8:51 pm
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.
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.