desitrader wrote:LesRonces wrote:
but there are millions of people who butcher the language when they speak who know every single thing they hear.
Not when they hear an accent from a less familiar social background, like for example working-class accent, which a native (who is not from a working-class background) would have no problem understanding.
Please don't generalise from your own experience. I find switching between registers pretty easy and I understand working class folks just as well as rich or super educated people. I might run into trouble with accents of regions where I've never been, but that's completely normal. Many natives don't understand unfamiliar accents either. Otherwise thick Bavarian accents or Swiss German wouldn't be subtitled on German TV or Scottish on English TV! As a native German I don't understand a word when Swiss Germans speak between each other. The only reason why I understand Austrians speaking between each other is because I had friends there for a while. My dad doesn't understand them as a native German speaker. And that's all supposed to be one language. Come to think of it, a lot of language learners understand more accents than the natives, because they make an effort to expose themselves to those accents. Does the average Texan understand a thick cockney accent? I very much doubt so. I understand Cockney AND Texan, probably precisely because I'm a non-native.
desitrader wrote:Having an accent and giving themselves away as non-natives = Not speaking like a native.
Well, that's a very strict way of defining things and you didn't make that at all clear in your original post. Accent reduction actually has limits and certain features of your native sound system are very hard to suppress. In my native German I tried for many years to get rid of my Saxony accent because I was living in West Germany. There the accent from Saxony is considered uneducated and provincial, and people simply don't take you seriously if you speak with that accent, especially in educated circles. No matter how hard I tried, my vowels always gave me away as at least coming from East Germany. I finally gave up with the achievement of sounding like someone from Berlin who is trying to speak high German. I use local expressions from the region where I lived in West Germany and don't give myself away with using East German vocabulary, but people will *always* know after just one sentence that I'm not from the West. Also, if you wonder why that is, I can refer you to a theory in Robotics that is called the "uncanny valley". If you make a robot too much like a human, he becomes creepy and the differences between the robot and a real human stand out even more. For more general acceptance it's therefore advisable to stay away from that area that is close to perfect but not quite. The closer you get to a proper TL accent the more obvious it will be to the native speakers that there is something wrong with the way you speak. They will actively try to catch a mistake or odd phrasing to figure out whether you are a native speaker or not and this will usually make them uncomfortable because they can't place you. Sure, you can impress people with it, but if you simply want to have a quick conversation without the endless "Where are you from? How come you speak like this, bla bla bla ..." speaking with a slight accent is actually preferable. Also, if you actually still make the occasional mistake in grammar, they will be much more obtrusive when you have a relatively convincing accent. With a slight accent people will tell you how well you speak, even if you make the occasional mistake. With a very convincing accent people will start to nitpick. Do you want to make people pay special attention to all your mistakes? I don't think so. Being able to produce a convincing accent is so overrated!
Now, here comes the fun part: I have friends from Luxembourg, non-native German speakers, who have such a convincing accent that it took me half an hour to figure out that they are non-natives. And yes, uncanny valley, I was really trying hard to catch them out. Their high German accent is more convincing than my own and I'm a native speaker! How they finally give themselves away is by very very infrequently using certain words that no German speaker would ever use. Such words tend to have fallen out of fashion in Germany about 100 years ago, but are still used in Luxembourgish. Other than that they speak *exactly* like natives, i.e. they use the same ungrammatical expressions of colloquial language, they use all the slang, they have no accent etc. In fact, they are as close as it gets to native speakers: They watched German TV when they were little, they tend to know more about German literature than the average native because their education system is much better, they get all the jokes that rely heavily on cultural knowledge, I share the exact kind of childhood memories of TV and music with them. And yet, strictly speaking they aren't native speakers, because they learned it as a foreign language in school, usually at the age of 6 and don't commonly speak German outside of school. There are statistics for Luxembourgish native speakers: 55% of the population of Luxembourg are native Luxembourgish speakers, only 2% are native German speakers. So, sorry, more than 200,000 people prove you wrong even with your way too narrow definition of having no accent at all!
And besides, if one ignores your unreasonable accent requirement, I know gazillions of foreign speakers who can run circles around native speakers in eloquence and grammar also in spoken language. They can also switch seamlessly between registers - educated, low-brow, slang - which very few natives ever master. Most natives are stuck with their origins, that's what "Educating Rita" is all about! So, there are actually many non-natives who have a better command of their target language than the natives. And that's much more important than having a convincing accent.
and move on to another thread.
