This comes from the fact that in English a lot of the meaning is heavily dependent on the actual pronunciation and native people who are mono lingual are really having hard time to understand when there are some differences in speech.
Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. Is it possible for an adult to learn a language without carrying a foreign accent?
Ask Question. Asked 4 years ago. Active 1 month ago. Viewed 2k times. Note: I was strongly encouraged to repost this question from Linguistics SE, where it is equally applicable and I'd expect to get answers from a different perspective.
Improve this question. TheEnvironmentalist TheEnvironmentalist 1 1 silver badge 4 4 bronze badges. For an adult, no. Too many obstacles: even if you are able to pronounce sounds in isolation correctly, you also need to learn how to make necessary changes to those sounds in connected speech. To make it worse, there also are cognitive constraints. It is inappropriate to post answers as comments. If you have evidence that adults cannot learn a foreign language without an accent, please post it in an answer.
Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Focus on the pronunciation early on in the learning process. The more grammar and vocabulary you learn without working on your pronunciation, the harder it will be to correct bad habits you will have made when speaking.
Immerse yourself in the target language. If it is possible to move to an area where the language is commonly spoken, do so. If not, listen to songs and watch films in the language, and try to pick up on subtle nuances in the speech. Simple audiobooks are another great tool as well. Look into conversing with native speakers through Skype or in person. Study minimal pairs in the language.
Minimal pairs are pairs of words that, except for one syllable, sound the same; studying them can help reduce the confusion between them and help cement the difference in your mind. Learn the IPA. Knowing it will allow you to use pronunciation guides tailored to your specific language, and you can ensure that you are producing the correct sounds.
The most important factor of all, however, is to practice constantly. In doing so, you can ensure you don't lose the progress that you have made, and over time, your pronunciation will improve. Improve this answer. I actually tend to think IPA is a very bad choice for mastering pronunciation, because it tends to oversimplify sounds to a point that's fantastic for being understood by others, but doesn't catch the dialect-specific and language-specific nuances properly — TheEnvironmentalist.
TheEnvironmentalist That feels like a straw man to me. All pronunciation descriptions for learners are simplified to a point that they miss out nuances and details, but IPA-based ones are generally less simplified than ones based on transliteration.
JanusBahsJacquet Yes and no. Yes in that IPA is a very, very useful tool in the right hands, no in that in most hands, it tends to displace better tools.
A non-IPA user trying to learn the sounds of a language will tend toward recordings of native speakers, likely the best source for phonology in any context. JanusBahsJacquet IPA is a great shortcut, in that it can reduce the time to learn the basic phonology of a language from months to hours. However, the drawback in this approach is that the IPA is really just a set of boxes drawn around the human sound continuum, much as musical notes are just points picked and labeled out of the frequency continuum.
While IPA users will tend to be understandable in their target language in no time flat, their time to eliminating their accent completely, as is the subject of the question, can often exceed that of non-IPA users because the IPA becomes a crutch. Show 1 more comment. She made the following changes in practicing her French: She listened more closely to the people she spoke with, to people on radio stations and on tv and to her teachers.
She also mimicked native speakers: not only the sounds they made but also how they moved their mouth and their body language.
She watched native speakers in action. This also included watching how the greeted and parted from each other, their facial expressions and body language. His pronunciation is very, very good, and very natural; but there is still something there that gives it away that he is in fact not a native speaker. Still, he comes very close.
Mimicry is a talent though. Resources for learning French. To improve your accent, you have to practice. The more you practice, the more you will progress. Read exercises or books aloud and record yourself to listen to yourself afterwards! With the Coliglote application you will be able to practice both speaking and in writing with a native speaker, whilst receiving corrections and personal advice!
Sneak peek to some application screens. Five reasons to love Coliglote! Coliglote how does it work? When a frenchman calls an indian call center.
Grazie Ingrid, sempre interessanti i resoconti delle tue esperienze di viaggio accompagnati da video molto divertenti. Soprattutto da Napoli!! Aahaha, estou a chorar de tanto de rir! Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed. Votre nom. Langue de la newsletter. J'accepte de recevoir la newsletter. She too married an Egyptian and lived in Cairo.
At the time of the study, Julie had lived in Egypt for 26 years, Laura for 10 years. Both were rated as native by six of the judges; two other judges rated one woman but not the other as native. Also, as the Egyptian study shows, some people will not be able to detect a slight accent. You may be able to fool some of the people some of the time.
If you feel that you have trouble being understood, specialized courses in accent reduction certainly can help. However, such courses will include a focus on technical aspects of pronunciation, and the results will not come quickly.
The main part of acquiring a good accent is to mimic how native speakers sound, which makes many learners uncomfortable as if they were pretending to be somebody they are not. And your accent is in fact a part of your story, your self—do you want to lose it completely?
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