What techniques do you use to improve TL pronunciation / accent?

General discussion about learning languages
drp9341
Orange Belt
Posts: 241
Joined: Tue Mar 29, 2016 1:21 pm
Location: NY, USA
Languages: Native: English (US)
C1/C2: Spanish, Italian
B2+: Portuguese
B2: French, Polish
A1: Russian, German
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=5978
x 962

What techniques do you use to improve TL pronunciation / accent?

Postby drp9341 » Wed Jan 02, 2019 7:14 am

I've never really seen this talked about all that much.

I'll usually...
(this is after feeling "pretty comfortable" with the spoken language, as a beginner, I listen and babble. I can't hear my own mistakes at the beginner level.)
Then I'll use Anki for shadowing, recording my voice, comparing it to a native speaker, and trying to get it to match(if I can.) I also look up the IPA to get a rough idea of how to articulators move.

Later on, at higher levels, I usually experiment with "posturing" my articulators in differently, to see if I can correctly articulate with more ease if my "resting posture" is different. I'll even look at native speakers tongues and jaw when speaking, and try to deduce from that what I can do to improve my pronunciation.

I continue to use Anki, even for Italian and Spanish, especially if I feel like I am forgetting the "sound" of the language. When I say forgetting the sound, think of it like the way you "hear in your head" a song you haven't listened to in ages, and you have a distorted sense of it's rhythm, only realizing, "I can hardly sing along!" when you hear the song on the radio.

Of course, the more advanced stuff is always after having acquired a good ear for the language; when I am able to hear small mispronunciations. Unless, I have a trusted native speaker to help me with this in the beginning.




I've only ever heard shadowing mentioned on HTLAL or this forum. I know Luca Lampariello has that whole phonetic analysis thing. I tried it on one text in Italian, a 25 second monologue. My issue with Italian was my rhythm, not misarticulating phonemes. It worked quite well, but it was boring, and required "commitment" which I would rather save for things like grammar study, or intensive listening.

Also, how do you deal with different languages, if they pose different challenges in terms of speaking with a "great" accent?
For a language like Polish - very hard in terms of articulating vs. a language like Italian, very hard to "internalize and reproduce" the musicality of the language appropriately, do you guys switch things up?

I can go into more detail on my techniques, but I want to hear what everyone else does! Especially for languages, (or even aspects of languages) which pose "unique" challenges!

Please share!
Happy New Year!
2 x

User avatar
SGP
Blue Belt
Posts: 927
Joined: Tue Oct 23, 2018 9:33 pm
Languages: DE (native), EN (C2), ES (B2), FR (B2); some more at various levels
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 30#p120230
x 293

Re: What techniques do you use to improve TL pronunciation / accent?

Postby SGP » Wed Jan 02, 2019 8:01 am

drp9341 wrote:I've never really seen this talked about all that much.

Gracias a ti para mencionarlo, drp colega.
(Thank you for mentioning it, drp colega).
Reducing accent is among my priorities as well, but of course without bending myself and trying to be someone I am not.

- Reading the IPA transcription and knowing what those Funky Fonetiks [sic] Letters stand for.

- Looking at reliable Points of Articulation Descriptions and Images, or simply recalling them.

- Paying additional attention to stress a.k.a. emphasis, intonation, and the speech melody.

TBC ASAP WRI [without rushing in]
1 x
Previously known as SGP. But my mental username now is langmon.

Log


drp9341
Orange Belt
Posts: 241
Joined: Tue Mar 29, 2016 1:21 pm
Location: NY, USA
Languages: Native: English (US)
C1/C2: Spanish, Italian
B2+: Portuguese
B2: French, Polish
A1: Russian, German
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=5978
x 962

Re: What techniques do you use to improve TL pronunciation / accent?

Postby drp9341 » Wed Jan 02, 2019 10:12 am

SGP wrote:
drp9341 wrote:I've never really seen this talked about all that much.

Gracias a ti para mencionarlo, drp colega.
(Thank you for mentioning it, drp colega).
Reducing accent is among my priorities as well, but of course without bending myself and trying to be someone I am not.

- Reading the IPA transcription and knowing what those Funky Fonetiks [sic] Letters stand for.

- Looking at reliable Points of Articulation Descriptions and Images, or simply recalling them.

- Paying additional attention to stress a.k.a. emphasis, intonation, and the speech melody.

TBC ASAP WRI [without rushing in]


What's the TBC ASAP WRI mean?

CompImp wrote:Lots of listening.


And you find that just lots of listening alone helps you acquire a "great accent"? (sorry for the non-specific terminology here. I'm trying to refer to, without getting all technical, being able to spontaneously speak in way so that:

1. You can properly pronounce all the sounds, (i.e. old Italian immigrants who've been listening to English for 50 years, but still can't make the majority of English vowels, not also present in Italian.)
2. People sometimes do not know you're not a native, (during a limited interaction, for example.)
3. You don't just use the target language, but talk the same way as you do in your mother tongue. (for example, the stereotypical French accent you hear in many old Hollywood films)

If you care to know where I'm coming from, here's a short anecdote.
I listened to Italian my whole life, and it wasn't until I made a commitment to "loose my accent" at 25 years old that I started to get a "great accent." It took me around a month of playing with "pitches" and trying to hear melodies more in Polish and English, and then about a month of:
1. intonation exercises, (inspired by the "phonetic analysis" of Luca Lampariello)
2. regular phone calls to different relatives each day, (my family had no idea that my goal was language related, (except one cousin! they were just happy I was calling each of them individually ~2x a week). I tried to keep the topics and "complexity" of these calls varied, but I don't think I learned many words or structures.

3. About 8 or 9 days in complete immersion, AFTER what I described above. To be fair, I was either talking or hearing people talk every waking second during that time, I don't even get that kind of immersion in my native English when I'm home in America!

The end result became very apparent by days 5 and 6 of my "immersion". My friends and family kept asking me how my Italian got so much better, I told them, "I'm trying to not be lazy anymore when I talk."

I agree that listening is great, but Italian has very few sounds that don't exist in English, especially in the area my family is from. For a language like Polish, I don't think this strategy, given identical circumstances, would have yielded similar results.
5 x

Kraut
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2599
Joined: Mon Aug 07, 2017 10:37 pm
Languages: German (N)
French (C)
English (C)
Spanish (A2)
Lithuanian
x 3204

Re: What techniques do you use to improve TL pronunciation / accent?

Postby Kraut » Wed Jan 02, 2019 11:19 am

SPANISH

1. contrastive analysis of the mistakes Germans tend to make, listening to what they do wrong

https://www.spanisch-lehrbuch.de/gramma ... el_1_1.htm

2. choosing an accent, I can understand the Madrid accent best and find it the easiest to articulate

https://de.verbling.com/lehrer-finden/spanisch
https://de.verbling.com/lehrer/18946177380379677587

3. I don't try to speak fast in Spanish because I make mistakes in articulation, speed will come naturally

4. from time to time I record myself for a native to point out mistakes

5. I have problems with "discurso conectado", the articulation point of /r/ and the pronunciation of /g/ like in "general"

6. watching and listening to guys like these

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fvq-CoM ... SWG3Ah9R54
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCouyFd ... 3M_2idKq1A
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC30I0Z ... YeXJtafYIA
0 x

User avatar
SGP
Blue Belt
Posts: 927
Joined: Tue Oct 23, 2018 9:33 pm
Languages: DE (native), EN (C2), ES (B2), FR (B2); some more at various levels
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 30#p120230
x 293

Re: What techniques do you use to improve TL pronunciation / accent?

Postby SGP » Wed Jan 02, 2019 11:53 am

drp9341 wrote:
SGP wrote:[...]
TBC ASAP WRI [without rushing in]

What's the TBC ASAP WRI mean?
Well, I didn't explain TBC and ASAP, because they are rather common.
The full Letter Salad Sentence means: To be continued, as soon as possible, without rushing in.

This is what I am doing right now, and maybe there will be some more later.

Some mentioned that for a closer-to-native accent, people can also imagine themselves as someone from Spain / Japan / any other country.

In addition, it is even helpful not to try too hard, like someone who wants to remove even the slightest trace of an accent. Because the remaining maybe 10% or 20% could be more difficult to "eliminate" than the other 90% or 80%.

And as Brendan [sic] Lewis (the Irish Polyglot) mentioned, one wouldn't be always able to even appear as a native speaker anyway, not even with a perfect accent. Neither is it something he or I would aim for. He then continued by saying that even if someone spoke to him exactly like someone from Ireland, but then he would tell him having watched Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as a child, it would fully become clear to him that this person isn't from Ireland. Because that series was called Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles in the UK. Then he went as far as saying that to be always able to fully mimic a native speaker in every single aspect (not about the accent, but about the overall impression), one would have to watch every single TV ad that native speakers have ever seen, know some other facts about the country or its people that only natives would know, etc. In short, this is unachievable, and not necessary either. End quote. But a near-to-native accent is Very Possible.
0 x
Previously known as SGP. But my mental username now is langmon.

Log


User avatar
Random Review
Green Belt
Posts: 449
Joined: Tue Jul 21, 2015 8:41 pm
Location: UK/Spain/China
Languages: En (N), Es (int), De (pre-int), Pt (pre-int), Zh-CN (beg), El (beg), yid (beg)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 75#p123375
x 919

Re: What techniques do you use to improve TL pronunciation / accent?

Postby Random Review » Wed Jan 02, 2019 2:13 pm

Regarding listening, I've found it useful to listen to things that I half understand in the early stages of learning. Comprehensible input (defined as stuff just above your level) doesn't help me with pronunciation unless the language is new to me. With comprehensible input, my brain is already unconsciously sorting out what I hear into (what it thinks are) the component phonemes and understanding the meaning, so I'm just reinforcing my current (inaccurate) phonemic map. With stuff way above my level, it's mostly just a wall of noise. But with stuff that's semi-comprehensible, I force my brain to really listen to the sounds as it looks for patterns.

This isn't possible with languages you know well, but to some extent I guess you can probably focus your brain on the sounds intentionally during extensive listening, but it sounds very hard work! I had more luck trying to sound like characters I like (because we seem to retain the ability to sound like people we like into adulthood). It seems our brains do retain the ability to hear sounds outside our current phonemic map into adulthood and this may be one way to consciously hack into that ability.

I only have anecdotal evidence for this last one, but we all know what it's like to unconsciously start to sound like someone we like a lot in our own language. I noticed in Spanish my pronunciation improved markedly in real time(!) when talking to people I really liked and not when talking to people I didn't know or only mildly liked. The effect was short lived (a few hours), but repeated over and over, I noticed that it did help me (slowly). My other anecdote was that I really liked Don Ramón in 'El Chavo del ocho' and found myself sometimes playfully copying his pronunciation when watching the programs on YouTube. That also seemed to help over time (though I never started sounding like someone from the North of Mexico).
4 x
German input 100 hours by 30-06: 4 / 100
Spanish input 200 hours by 30-06: 0 / 200
German study 50 hours by 30-06: 3 / 100
Spanish study 200 hours by 30-06: 0 / 200
Spanish conversation 100 hours by 30-06: 0 / 100

User avatar
Random Review
Green Belt
Posts: 449
Joined: Tue Jul 21, 2015 8:41 pm
Location: UK/Spain/China
Languages: En (N), Es (int), De (pre-int), Pt (pre-int), Zh-CN (beg), El (beg), yid (beg)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 75#p123375
x 919

Re: What techniques do you use to improve TL pronunciation / accent?

Postby Random Review » Thu Jan 03, 2019 12:25 am

CompImp wrote:
drp9341 wrote:
CompImp wrote:Lots of listening.


And you find that just lots of listening alone helps you acquire a "great accent"? (sorry for the non-specific terminology here. I'm trying to refer to, without getting all technical, being able to spontaneously speak in way so that:


Not what i would call 'great' or even mistaken for native, no, but it's very decent. Much better than most learners. But, i'm not in the norm since i don't begin to speak until phrases automatically jump out of my mouth. I don't try to train speaking, i let listening and internally shadowing do its thing until my speaking emerges.

In English this took about 3000 hours. In French i'm still getting there, but my speaking is now starting to emerge. My writing is getting spontaneously much better (ie, i put fingers to keys and decent French comes out without thinking) but i still have a way to go before it matches my other languages. My French input is currently at around 6000 hours.


I must compliment you on your English writing. I thought you were native. Very impressive.
0 x
German input 100 hours by 30-06: 4 / 100
Spanish input 200 hours by 30-06: 0 / 200
German study 50 hours by 30-06: 3 / 100
Spanish study 200 hours by 30-06: 0 / 200
Spanish conversation 100 hours by 30-06: 0 / 100

User avatar
Adrianslont
Blue Belt
Posts: 827
Joined: Sun Aug 16, 2015 10:39 am
Location: Australia
Languages: English (N), Learning Indonesian and French
x 1936

Re: What techniques do you use to improve TL pronunciation / accent?

Postby Adrianslont » Thu Jan 03, 2019 9:26 am

CompImp wrote:
drp9341 wrote:
CompImp wrote:Lots of listening.


And you find that just lots of listening alone helps you acquire a "great accent"? (sorry for the non-specific terminology here. I'm trying to refer to, without getting all technical, being able to spontaneously speak in way so that:


Not what i would call 'great' or even mistaken for native, no, but it's very decent. Much better than most learners. But, i'm not in the norm since i don't begin to speak until phrases automatically jump out of my mouth. I don't try to train speaking, i let listening and internally shadowing do its thing until my speaking emerges.

In English this took about 3000 hours. In French i'm still getting there, but my speaking is now starting to emerge. My writing is getting spontaneously much better (ie, i put fingers to keys and decent French comes out without thinking) but i still have a way to go before it matches my other languages. My French input is currently at around 6000 hours.

I’m curious about why it took 3000 hours to “get there” in English but you are still not “there” after 6000 hours of French input.

I’m wondering if it has something to do with your native language - and i have no idea what your native language is. Or perhaps you have some ideas why French is needing so much more input that you could share?

Why am I curious? Apart from general curiosity. French is one of my target languages and 6000 hours seems so much! 3000 seems doable.

Cheers.
0 x

User avatar
Adrianslont
Blue Belt
Posts: 827
Joined: Sun Aug 16, 2015 10:39 am
Location: Australia
Languages: English (N), Learning Indonesian and French
x 1936

Re: What techniques do you use to improve TL pronunciation / accent?

Postby Adrianslont » Thu Jan 03, 2019 10:25 am

CompImp wrote:
Adrianslont wrote:
CompImp wrote:
drp9341 wrote:
CompImp wrote:Lots of listening.


And you find that just lots of listening alone helps you acquire a "great accent"? (sorry for the non-specific terminology here. I'm trying to refer to, without getting all technical, being able to spontaneously speak in way so that:


Not what i would call 'great' or even mistaken for native, no, but it's very decent. Much better than most learners. But, i'm not in the norm since i don't begin to speak until phrases automatically jump out of my mouth. I don't try to train speaking, i let listening and internally shadowing do its thing until my speaking emerges.

In English this took about 3000 hours. In French i'm still getting there, but my speaking is now starting to emerge. My writing is getting spontaneously much better (ie, i put fingers to keys and decent French comes out without thinking) but i still have a way to go before it matches my other languages. My French input is currently at around 6000 hours.

I’m curious about why it took 3000 hours to “get there” in English but you are still not “there” after 6000 hours of French input.

I’m wondering if it has something to do with your native language - and i have no idea what your native language is. Or perhaps you have some ideas why French is needing so much more input that you could share?

Why am I curious? Apart from general curiosity. French is one of my target languages and 6000 hours seems so much! 3000 seems doable.

Cheers.

The reasons are probably various. The main one being my satisfaction with my own level. I was functioning in French just fine at 3000 hours, but i polished English up earlier in terms of hours spent. My French is ok i'm just not happy with it, that's all. So i continue to count.

I was also totally immersed in English, for every waking second of every single day. 3000 constant hours and 3000 hours over 3 years aren't created equal.

Then of course attraction to the material is important. I only do what i like in French, but English has much more material that i'm totally addicted to.

Thanks for the reply.

I certainly can find more enjoyable content in French than in Indonesian myself and consider that an important factor in my progress.

I’m still wondering what your mother tongue is, though!
0 x

garyb
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1572
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 12:35 pm
Location: Scotland
Languages: Native: English
Advanced: Italian, French
Intermediate: Spanish
Beginner: German, Japanese
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1855
x 5992
Contact:

Re: What techniques do you use to improve TL pronunciation / accent?

Postby garyb » Thu Jan 03, 2019 10:57 am

There have been a few threads on this topic that I've posted in, so to avoid repeating myself: Proven ways to get a native-like accent, Chorusing, Is pronunciation a function of intelligence?; despite the silly subject lines of the first and last, there's some good discussion in there.

The short version for me is that "just listening" absolutely doesn't work and perhaps even reinforces bad pronunciation as everything I hear is filtered through my faulty model of the language's phonetics, but more focused methods (and I've tried most of them) have only given me marginal improvements. I've now just accepted that I have a bad ear and I settle for okay pronunciation: being comprehensible, not obviously sounding like an English speaker, getting individual sounds mostly right and prosody vaguely close. I was pouring time and effort into trying to go from okay to good, but between the lackluster results and the diminishing returns of better pronunciation (for what I use my languages for) I'd now rather prioritise other aspects of the languages.

I've never done a long silent period, and while intuitively it makes little sense given what I said about the model, I don't have the experience to discount it. I can certainly say though that incorrect habits picked up at the start (from high school French in my case) are very hard to fix and surely contributed to that faulty model, so learning pronunciation badly is probably worse than not trying to learn it at all...
3 x


Return to “General Language Discussion”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests