Improving my English accent as an adult

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Lawyer&Mom
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Re: Improving my English accent as an adult

Postby Lawyer&Mom » Sat Aug 06, 2022 2:35 am

Deinonysus wrote:I would advise you to stick as closely as you can to a neutral American or English accent. If you throw in a cot-caught merger, for instance, that is generally a regional feature (most associated with the upper Midwest), so listeners are likely to get their wires crossed trying to process, say, a Minnesota accent and a Spanish language accent at the same time.


I thought about this post last night while I was watching a Swiss mini-series, Cellule de Crise. Most of the show is in French, but one scene had the protagonist speaking English with the American ambassador. The ambassador was clearly meant to be a wealthy Republican woman from somewhere like Texas or Oklahoma. So a ’Murican accent, but polished, educated ’Murican. And she was doing a good job! But she had this really slight British accent on certain words. So slight that it wouldn’t be weird for a real American with a somewhat Mid-Atlantic accent. But you can’t be from Boston *and* Houston. Not both in the same person. I looked it up. The actress, Dianne Weller, is Australian. She does voice-over work, she’s really good, there wasn’t a trace of Aussie in her accent, but mixing different regional features is just always going to sound wrong.
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Re: Improving my English accent as an adult

Postby Le Baron » Sat Aug 06, 2022 3:26 am

Yes, she should have stuck to Australian.
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Re: Improving my English accent as an adult

Postby SpanishInput » Sat Aug 13, 2022 1:13 am

Some progress:

Today I’ve noticed I’m becoming more sensible to the difference between /s/ and /z/. I can actually hear it now if I focus. But sometimes the difference is so subtle that I have to rely on the length of the previous vowel in order to identify them. (Pre-fortis clipping)

I’m also slowly starting to tune my ears to the English /h/. Whenever I think I’ve heard a /p/, I stop and replay the recording before deciding.

Another difference I’m becoming more sensible to is /n/ vs /ŋ/. In Spanish both [n] and [ŋ] are just allophones of the /n/ phoneme, so this one is taking me some time to differentiate. In fact, in some coastal and Caribbean dialects we sometimes realize word-final /n/ as [ŋ], so “pan” becomes [paŋ].

New confusion:

I’m now working on /oʊ/ (GOAT), and believe it or not I’m confusing /oʊ/ with /ʌ/ (STRUT). The /oʊ/ diphthong is hard for me to hear. I hear it as a monophthong [o], which I mentally associate with a stressed schwa (ʌ) in English. I have two possible explanations for this:

The /ow/ diphthong, the closest thing in Spanish to the English /oʊ/ phoneme, is never present inside any native non-compound Spanish words I’m aware of. It pretty much only happens between words in connected speech and in rather rare compounds such as “estadounidense”.
Because I’m exposed to a lot of Americans speaking Spanish, I’m used to processing their /oʊ/ as an allophone of the Spanish /o/, thus filtering out the glide part.

Recurring confusions:

I’m mixing /ɝ/ and /ɚ/ with /ʊr/. I’m also mixing /æ/ with /ʌ/ and /ɛ/ with /æ/. I really have to double-check what I’m hearing when I encounter these sounds. And… this is a bit of cheating, but I sometimes try to remember the spelling of words, and, if most of the words in the card are spelt with <e> then I deduct the sound is probably /ɛ/, if most are spelt with <a> then I guess the sound is probably /æ/, and if most are spelt with <u> then the sound is probably /ʌ/. Of course this guessing doesn’t always work and sometimes I’m surprised to see the actual spelling after pressing the “show answer” button in my flashcards.

I’ve recently learned that…

The <l> in folk is not pronounced. Also, the <b> in climb and other words ending in <mb> is not pronounced. And English speakers sometimes spell an <s> but pronounce a /z/, and viceversa. I had no idea that a final /s/ vs final /z/ can completely change the meaning of a word.
My listening skills are not as good as I had assumed. I tried watching a bit of Lost in Space on Netflix using Language Reactor in “hide subtitles” mode, and this was a humbling experience as I failed to understand a few lines by the Robinsons and Ben Adler. I realize I need to schedule time for intensive listening exercises with movies and TV shows. It’s very easy to fool oneself into thinking one can “understand everything”, when that’s not really the case.
The presenter of Pimsleur courses (I’m also going through Pimsleur Mandarin) pronounces “when” as /ʍɛn/ (Or is it [hwɛn]?), but this is a conservative distinction that’s not taught to learners (whine-wine merger) and is not found in any dictionary I’ve consulted.

A needed change in attitude

Some people discart TV and movies as trash and don’t consider them a serious resource for language learning. For example, the otherwise amazing book for language learners titled “The Word Brain” has this section:

“Apart from high quality documentaries, which are rare, TV is a poor source of content, and most of us would prefer reading books or scientific journals. TV is also mostly irrelevant. [...] watching TV is basically tantamount to killing precious life time.”

Unfortunately, it’s hard to get over this attitude and actually book time to watch Netflix as study time, but you need it if you want to train your ears. Even as I’m writing this I still don’t have a schedule for English ear training with Netflix, which is quite hypocritical, because I do watch English content on Netflix.
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Lawyer&Mom
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Re: Improving my English accent as an adult

Postby Lawyer&Mom » Sat Aug 13, 2022 5:41 am

The <l> in folk isn’t quite that simple. At least for me. If I say “Hey folks!” it sounds just like “Hey fokes!” No <l> whatsoever. But if I’m talking about the “Folk Life” music festival, there is the faintest shadow of an <l> in there. Same with “yolk” and “polka”. (Unless we are talking about “polka dots”… then the <l> disappears…)

For your purposes, yes, absolutely, it’s totally fine not to pronounce the <l>.
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Re: Improving my English accent as an adult

Postby tungemål » Sat Aug 13, 2022 9:17 am

Interesting observations. You seem to be taking phonology seriously.

I have to admit I wasn't aware of the cot-caught difference. Is that difference there also in British english?

Edit: I mean the difference in vowel quality, not length.

When to pronounce /z/ - this one is hard as there seems to be no rules. I also don't have this sound in my native language so I tend to regard s and z as the same sound.
Last edited by tungemål on Sat Aug 13, 2022 10:11 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Improving my English accent as an adult

Postby DaveAgain » Sat Aug 13, 2022 9:36 am

tungemål wrote:I have to admit I wasn't aware of the cot-caught difference. Is that difference there also in British english?
I pronounce them differently, I'm from S. England. North of the Thames is bandit country though, all norms cease.

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Danelaw areas have/had some pronunciation differences.
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Re: Improving my English accent as an adult

Postby rdearman » Sat Aug 13, 2022 9:39 am

tungemål wrote:Interesting observations. You seem to be taking phonology seriously.

I have to admit I wasn't aware of the cot-caught difference. Is that difference there also in British english?

When to pronounce /z/ - this one is hard as there seems to be no rules. I also don't have this sound in my native language so I tend to regard s and z as the same sound.

As Le Baron said in British English you can hear the difference between cot and cought more clearly. Cought vowels are slightly longer and the t is softer. I have to admit that I spend a stupid amount of time saying these two words to see if I was doing it differently. I personally can hear a difference when I say it, but most people would struggle to hear a difference.

Btw, I speak both dialects of English. :lol:
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Re: Improving my English accent as an adult

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Sat Aug 13, 2022 5:24 pm

Cot and caught sound the same from me. Folk sometimes with an 'l', sometimes not. Yolk never with an 'l.' Polka same as Lawyerandmom.
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Re: Improving my English accent as an adult

Postby SpanishInput » Tue Aug 16, 2022 1:26 am

rdearman wrote:
Btw, I speak both dialects of English. :lol:


Wow! According to professor Paul Carley, British English has more vowel phonemes than General American. He counts 13 in the "merged" Gen Am accent and 20 in modern British (not RP). The consonant count is the same.

Progress update: I'm just slowly going through the Anki cards I've created. I got tired of switching back and forth between my regular keyboard layout and my IPA keyboard layout, so I merged them into a single version that has everything to be able to type in English, Spanish and the basic IPA symbols for both languages... and nothing more. Here's how it looks like right now. The most common symbols for both languages can be accessed with simple key combinations.
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Re: Improving my English accent as an adult

Postby SpanishInput » Thu Aug 18, 2022 1:05 am

Something interesting happened to me yesterday. I was reviewing a card and a mistook a /p/ for an /h/. The exact opposite of what happened to me a few days ago. Looks like while I’m still calibrating my perception to English /p/ vs /h/ this kind of thing will happen.

I’m still having trouble telling final /s/ from final /z/ apart. For example, yesterday I reviewed a card with the recording of “poise” /pɔɪz/, but I didn’t hear the /z/. Afterwards I opened the sound file in Praat, and indeed, the voiced section of the ending fricative lasts for less than 50 miliseconds, maybe 40. In other words, about as much as a single frame in a 30 fps video. The rest of the fricative is unvoiced. No wonder it’s so hard for me to register it as voiced. This could make a compelling argument for language courses having a speed control button so the student can listen to the same recording at 0.75x or 0.50x. There are small, brief, blink-and-you-miss-it details that are really hard to catch for non-native speakers.
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