Speaking like a native -- cut to the chase

[drp9341]

Spanish is probably one of the easiest languages for an English speaker to pass for a native speaker in. However, it's still astronomically time consuming to do so.

I've passed for a native speaker from a different country many times, I don't know precisely how long I would be able to do this for though, since people usually ask if I'm from "X" country after a minute or so. That being said, this only happens when I'm using Spanish A LOT. If I stop using Spanish for a few days, then people can quickly tell I'm not a native speaker.

There aren't many new sounds that don't exist in English. The only sounds I can think of are the two slightly varying b/v sounds, (they don't vary by letter, but rather based on whether they're between vowels, or at the start of an utterance) and the 'r' sounds. I guess also the hard J and the ll/y sound/s if the accent you study has those.

The hardest part has to be the suprasegmental features. The machine gun like rhythm / chunking thoughts together like a native (e.g. when to pause to take a breath.) The rhythm is actually straightforward if you're OK with speaking like an emotionless robot - just pronounce every syllable (roughly speaking) for an equal amount of time.

The hard part is conveying subtle meaning while adhering to this rule of pronouncing everything the 'same length.' In English we stretch out words to stress if something's important. In Spanish they use intonation and volume.

The very good news is that in the US, if your accent is almost perfect, then people will assume you're a heritage speaker, or you're a native who spent a lot of time in the US. Honestly if you can roll your 'r's properly, most Latin Americans in the US will assume that English isn't your first language, (depending on how you look, obviously.)

After reading some of your posts, I would focus primarily on rhythm, and making sure you're pronouncing the vowels correctly all the time. If I switch from English to Spanish quickly I still sometimes catch myself pronouncing the letter 'i' like the English sound in 'it.'


You're going to need to watch, and listen to a huge amount of Spanish in order to pass for a native for longer than 5 seconds. You need to get to the point where you can listen to an hour long podcast, understand everything like would if it were in English, and then start to pick up the nuances and emulate them correctly yourself. If you don't know what was said, then you can't make a judgement about pronunciation.

You're in for a long ride. You need to work on slang, register, pronunciation, intonation, fluency, vocabulary, automizing grammar, etc.

I would suggest lots and lots of listening and reading, and thinking of tons and tons of questions.
The subjunctive is not to be underestimated, it's not always creo que = indicative and no creo que = subjunctive. Ser and estar, as well as the verbs of change are some other "basic" things that become difficult once again at higher levels, at least those are what come to mind right now.

Learning all the grammar, and being able to tell what sounds right and wrong is one thing, but knowing this grammar well enough that you use it correctly and automatically is another thing. You need to be your worst critic, and find a native speaker who is also a huge critic.

I can't imagine the amount of work it would take to convince someone from, (for example) Puebla Mexico that you're from Puebla Mexico, but it's not impossible to speak well enough that people assume you're a native speaker from some unknown region, although that is also super time consuming and having a near-native accent alone isn't enough.

Best of luck!

[Neurotip]

Hi eido,

I don't know if you've found this too, but when I'm talking to a non-native speaker of English, the main thing I notice is how effortful it is *for me*. That's a question of how much work I have to put in to understanding their accent, yes, but also trying to compensate for weird phrasing and odd word choice, to put up with long pauses and repetitions, etc. As others have mentioned, there are non-native speakers who take *less* effort to understand than some native speakers, which I think is part of the 'your accent is pleasant to listen to' phenomenon.

Specifically with regard to accent, you've had some very detailed advice. I might just add a couple of thoughts - from a 'this is how I do it' point of view, not based on experience of others...

1. Learn IPA, as others have said, but don't just learn IPA, learn a bit of articulatory phonetics, learn to feel which way your tongue and palate are moving when you make a particular sound.

2. Being able to reproduce an isolated phoneme is fine, but the next level is feeling a phoneme as a *gesture*, a movement in particular directions, and observing how it varies depending on the sounds surrounding it. Ask questions like 'in a sequence i-consonant-i, do I try to keep my tongue up the whole time and does that affect how the consonant sounds?' Practise common sequences of sounds - I don't know much Spanish but in Italian I've found it helpful to perfect my '-ante' for example. Take long walks on crowded streets making odd repetitive noises. (It works for me.)

Just my 2p.

[StringerBell]

I don't know if you've found this too, but when I'm talking to a non-native speaker of English, the main thing I notice is how effortful it is *for me*. That's a question of how much work I have to put in to understanding their accent, yes, but also trying to compensate for weird phrasing and odd word choice, to put up with long pauses and repetitions, etc. As others have mentioned, there are non-native speakers who take *less* effort to understand than some native speakers, which I think is part of the 'your accent is pleasant to listen to' phenomenon.

I thought you were going somewhere totally different when I read the first sentence. I was expecting you to talk about how difficult it is for you, yourself, to talk to non-native English speakers, rather than how difficult it is for you to understand them. This is something I've often noticed with certain people; when I can tell that English isn't their native language, I try to speak slower, clearer, use fewer phrasal verbs and idioms and cultural references. I end up putting a lot of effort into how I'm speaking to try to make it easier for the other person to understand me, and then speaking in my native language becomes a really laborious act and it starts not feeling like my native language anymore because I'm talking in a weird way.

However, when I meet non-native English speakers who have an obvious accent but have a very good comfort level with speaking English, I revert to speaking the way I normally do and there's no extra stress or pressure on me; I talk to them as if I were talking to native speakers. I think having a decent accent is a good goal to strive for, but a perfect "native" accent just isn't important if you really have a good command of the language.

[Iversen]

My native language (Danish) is obviously so much rarer than English that I rarely meet tourists who try to speak to me in it, but I do have some experience with foreign workers here and with tourists who speak their best school English to me. And once they are above the level where they can't remember the words and make long pauses or can't compose a simple sentence or have a particularly atrocious prounciation I don' feel that it is too hard to have a conversation with them.

I see it this way: my own pronunciation in foreign languages isn't something to write home about, but it gets better after a few days in a suitable environment. Why? Well, because I know how to listen, and then my own pronunciation drifts towards something more similar to what I hear. And the same ability to tune into the speech of a native person can also be used to analyze the speech patterns of less than native-like foreign speakers, provided that they can deliver a reasonably fluent speech at all. But stuttering utterances with wrong words and faulty grammar will block the adaptation process for me. A slightly off the mark pronunciation alone won't bother me nearly as much.

[Neurotip]

I thought you were going somewhere totally different when I read the first sentence. I was expecting you to talk about how difficult it is for you, yourself, to talk to non-native English speakers, rather than how difficult it is for you to understand them. This is something I've often noticed with certain people; when I can tell that English isn't their native language, I try to speak slower, clearer, use fewer phrasal verbs and idioms and cultural references. I end up putting a lot of effort into how I'm speaking to try to make it easier for the other person to understand me, and then speaking in my native language becomes a really laborious act and it starts not feeling like my native language anymore because I'm talking in a weird way.

Yes, I meant that too! Looks like when I say 'talk to' I sometimes mean 'converse with'... Anyway that's exactly what I was getting at, with the implication that if OP (as the non-native speaker) could avoid being laborious to talk to (with!), without necessarily 'fooling' anyone into thinking they were a native speaker, they'd probably have achieved a level they'd find satisfactory in practice.

[Cavesa]

Before, I was talking about my experience from the side of the non native, but it is useful to look from the other side, true.

I definitely agree the subjective difficulty for the natives to communicate with the non native is the most important thing, when one wants to fit in. And I definitely wouldn't say the accent is the most important part of it.

I know a lot of non native Czech speakers. Yeah, not classical tourists. But immigrants doing various jobs, foreign students taking the degree in Czech, and so on. The native languages of those people I remember well (those using the language in normal life, not tourists trying three words): Ukrainian, Russian, French, Spanish, Albanian, Moldovan, Arabic, German, Polish, English, Georgian.

What is the worst thing making it hard for me to communicate with some of them? Weak comprehension. Having to rephrase things, dumb stuff down, being misunderstood (even in important things), that is the absolutely worst problem. It is annoying and stressful. It makes me question their competence more than anything else. It makes me wanna scream and request a different nurse/doctor/waiter/anything. This exact problem made me fear for a family member's life a few times. (And this is not just my experience. I know of a case of the foreign students seriously harming a patient, because they hadn't understood a simple instruction, despite officially having passed their Czech exams).

Then it is the rest.

Grammar mistakes are tolerable, but the people making few of them definitely look more competent, and are easier to understand. Deciphering bad grammar is more tiring then deciphering a strong accent for me. It's a mess.
I think learners around B2 tend to make a huge mistake of believing they know it all.

Vocabulary: that one depends the most on what are the people doing. Of course rich vocab makes you look smarter. But in some situations, you don't need too much of it. In others, definitely. It can be very limiting.
I feel this as a serious limitation in some of my languages. I can see it clearly on some of my teachers, when they sound like morons while lecturing in English. Low vocab definitely makes a bad impression and lowers the respect people have for you in professional setting.

Pronunciation and accent: yes, really bad pronunciation is a serious communication obstacle (curiously, I think people with related native languages like Ukrainian tend to have a much worse accent in Czech than people with more distant ones. Perhaps they just don't pay enough attention to learning it). But just a notable non-native one is absolutely normal. I've met a few people with very light accents, which sounded like Moravian to my Prague based ears. Yes, I can normally tell the person is not a native speaker. But as long as the rest of their skills is good, I don't have a problem communicating with them, I don't think about it much, and I am truly feeling they are my equals in that situation.

Yes, pronunciation should not be underestimated. But neither it should be overestimated. Truth be told, I'd be wary of someone with perfect accent and weaker comprehension. It would be a trap.

[Axon]

Most Chinese speakers are very quick to praise Westerners who speak Chinese with any degree of fluency, but yesterday I got a compliment that shed a bit of light on the thought process. I said I was American and she said "You don't sound like an American at all! Most of them speak like this (she moved her hand horizontally in a straight line) but you speak like this! (she moved her hand up and down to indicate prosody)" So she didn't say anything like "Your tones are good" but instead there was a general rhythm to my speech that better fit what she preferred to hear from foreigners.

Of course, it should be noted that she was trying to sell me something.

[Flickserve]

Before, I was talking about my experience from the side of the non native, but it is useful to look from the other side, true.

I definitely agree the subjective difficulty for the natives to communicate with the non native is the most important thing, when one wants to fit in. And I definitely wouldn't say the accent is the most important part of it.

I know a lot of non native Czech speakers. Yeah, not classical tourists. But immigrants doing various jobs, foreign students taking the degree in Czech, and so on. The native languages of those people I remember well (those using the language in normal life, not tourists trying three words): Ukrainian, Russian, French, Spanish, Albanian, Moldovan, Arabic, German, Polish, English, Georgian.

What is the worst thing making it hard for me to communicate with some of them? Weak comprehension. Having to rephrase things, dumb stuff down, being misunderstood (even in important things), that is the absolutely worst problem. It is annoying and stressful. It makes me question their competence more than anything else. It makes me wanna scream and request a different nurse/doctor/waiter/anything. This exact problem made me fear for a family member's life a few times. (And this is not just my experience. I know of a case of the foreign students seriously harming a patient, because they hadn't understood a simple instruction, despite officially having passed their Czech exams).

Then it is the rest.

Grammar mistakes are tolerable, but the people making few of them definitely look more competent, and are easier to understand. Deciphering bad grammar is more tiring then deciphering a strong accent for me. It's a mess.
I think learners around B2 tend to make a huge mistake of believing they know it all.

Vocabulary: that one depends the most on what are the people doing. Of course rich vocab makes you look smarter. But in some situations, you don't need too much of it. In others, definitely. It can be very limiting.
I feel this as a serious limitation in some of my languages. I can see it clearly on some of my teachers, when they sound like morons while lecturing in English. Low vocab definitely makes a bad impression and lowers the respect people have for you in professional setting.

Pronunciation and accent: yes, really bad pronunciation is a serious communication obstacle (curiously, I think people with related native languages like Ukrainian tend to have a much worse accent in Czech than people with more distant ones. Perhaps they just don't pay enough attention to learning it). But just a notable non-native one is absolutely normal. I've met a few people with very light accents, which sounded like Moravian to my Prague based ears. Yes, I can normally tell the person is not a native speaker. But as long as the rest of their skills is good, I don't have a problem communicating with them, I don't think about it much, and I am truly feeling they are my equals in that situation.

Yes, pronunciation should not be underestimated. But neither it should be overestimated. Truth be told, I'd be wary of someone with perfect accent and weaker comprehension. It would be a trap.

All this would be exactly the same for a native speaker making mistakes to another native speaker.

If a person can't sound competent or makes mistakes in their own native language, it's doubtful they can surpass that level in their second language.

[Speakeasy]

Most Chinese speakers are very quick to praise Westerners who speak Chinese with any degree of fluency ...

Compliments of this sort may be universal. Although my Québécois friends, acquaintances, colleagues as well as total strangers have often complimented me on my French, I have occasionally replied that, if my French were really all that good, they would not even notice it! That is, the compliment is a clear indication that I cannot pass for one of them. It is possible that this sort of praise is more a sign of respect for the efforts that we have been making, of good will towards us, and of a certain level social acceptance than a genuine evaluation of the our skills in the L2.

[Skynet]

Although my Québécois friends, acquaintances, colleagues as well as total strangers have often complimented me on my French, I have occasionally replied that, if my French were really all that good, they would not even notice it! That is, the compliment is a clear indication that I cannot pass for one of them. It is possible that this sort of praise is more a sign of respect for the efforts that we have been making, of good will towards us, and of a certain level social acceptance than a genuine evaluation of the our skills in the L2.

I remember reading one of your posts in which you stated that you have not attained a native accent despite having been immersed in French for three decades. Accepting this reality lifted a tremendous burden off my shoulders as I am no longer self-conscious about my L2/3/4 accents.