Language Trainers Blog

It’s that time of year when the Oscars are announced. Recently I wrote about using world cinema as a tool for language learning and development.  As some of my favourite films have won the Best Foreign Film award, (Czech film Kolya won in 1996, and Argentinian film El Secreto De Sus Ojos took the title in 2009) I will paying particular attention to the nominees this year.

This years’ ceremony takes place on February 26th, and the shortlisted films are due to be announced next Tuesday. This Wednesday, nine films were chosen to be on the long list out of 63 entries. The following titles, at the time of writing, are currently in the running for Best Foreign Film 2012.

Bullhead (Dutch/French)

SuperClasico (Danish/Spanish)

Pina (German, various)

Monsieur Lazhar (French)

A Separation (Persian) This just won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film, and so is tipped to win the Oscar as well.

Footnote (Hebrew)

Omar Killed Me (French)

In Darkness (Polish/Ukrainian)

Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale (Seediq/Japanese)

As a student of Spanish, none particularly appeal to me from a learning point of view. Having said this, I find it’s always good fun to test your aural skills whilst watching films which feature more than one language. If you close your eyes so you can’t see which character is speaking, can you distinguish from two different languages if you speak neither of them? I had trouble with this when watching Kolya, as both Czech, Russian and Slovak are spoken throughout the film. Therefore, personally, I would be most interested to see In Darkness and Warriors of the Rainbow: Seediq Bale. The latter features Seediq, an aboriginal language spoken in Taiwan.

Do the Foreign Film awards inspire you to watch other films?

If any readers have seen any films listed here, please let us know!

It seems that native speakers of certain languages are able to roll their ‘r’s more easily than others. For me, as a native English speaker currently learning Spanish, it’s very difficult to pronounce rolled ‘r’s, which is also known as the alveolar trill. For example, trying to convey the name of a Cuban bar (Barrio) was particularly difficult when trying to arrange to meet up with my Spanish friend Eva recently. Pronouncing ‘r’s in an English accent, in the English form, is a huge disadvantage to communication in Spanish.

An Italian friend tells me that some children are taught the word “rabarbaro” (rhubarb) at school to help them pronounce their ‘r’s correctly. This word is not commonly used in the Italian language otherwise. In fact, when I told my Italian flatmate this word, he didn’t know what it meant. It could have been my pronunciation of course, but I wrote it down for him as well!

Having said all of this, one of my best friends, Mairi, is Scottish, and has no problem with rolling her ‘r’s, especially as you need to roll the r in her name to pronounce it correctly. So, is it down to accent?

This led me to try and find a way to learn how to do this properly. It is all in the tongue vibration, apparently. A lot of online help assumes you have an American accent, but I know of a few tips for us Brits.

The short term solution, for emergency use whilst you practice getting your tongue around your ‘r’s, is to pronounce the r as a hard D. You have to say it really fast to get away with it, but it does work! “Barrio” becomes “baDio,” and at least Eva will now know where I want to meet up for cocktails in the near future.

It’s better to try than to risk becoming a tentative speaker, as this is something that can really damage your confidence with speaking new languages.

Of course, in the long term, the only solution is practice, practice, practice. This video tutorial really helped me work out how to position my tongue properly, which is the basic principal to getting your alveolar trill right. If you’re not a visual learner, the WikiHow article is useful too. There are tongue twisters you can use to practice, but assuming that if you’re not confident with your rolled ‘r’s just yet, your level of Spanish isn’t advanced enough for this, so I like to stick to a short list of familiar words to practice with to begin. “Ferrocarril” (railway) is the perfect word to start off.

What works best for you? Does anyone have any other tips?

When you learn a language, do you choose your accent, or does your accent choose you? Perhaps you are learning in a rural place and get used to the local accents because you talk to the locals. In this case, do you insist on training yourself to use a ’standard’ form of speech? Obviously, regional words and phrases may make you easier to understand for locals and more difficult for others, but if you were as comprehensible as other regional speakers, would you mind having an accent?

When learning Chinese, would you go with southern pronunciation, or the Beijing accent which has pronounced arrrrs, like a pirate? For Spanish, would you learn Mexican Spanish or Catalan? For English, American or British? And would you specify even further?

One of my favourite waiters is a Chinese guy who speaks in a faux Cockney accent. He not only puts on the strong accent, but uses a lot of slang, too. He is very proud of the fact that he has English friends and has a believable accent. He gets better every time I see him, and there’s nothing like having a Chinese guy call you geezer and tell you that the nosh is pukka!

Do you worry about your accent, or do you just focus on knowing the words to use?

I’ve written a lot about trying to listen to as much language as you can, whether it be in real life, or (even better) in a format that you can listen to more than once, and hopefully read along with.

I’m lucky to have a language teacher who has a very pleasant voice and manner of speaking, so when she records texts for me, it’s never a chore to listen to (although I do sometimes have to talk myself into listening to lessons rather than music or podcasts in English). However, I’ve heard a lot of people whose recording voices are almost painful to listen to, and I would struggle to make it through the few minutes it would take to listen to an article.

One particular example was an audiobook version of a book I’d already read and liked. The narrator had a grating accent and manner of speaking that emphasised all the wrong parts of the sentence and set my teeth on edge. I had to stop listening after less than a chapter.

I’ve found that I am more judgemental of speakers of my own language, though. I tend not to notice accents so much with foreign languages, and I’m not advanced enough yet to know if they are pronouncing things wrong. I haven’t found a foreign language speaker that I can’t listen to yet, which is probably a good thing!

Have you ever had to switch audio off because of the reader?

A voice mapping project by the British Library has collected thousands of voice samples from around the world. Speakers have recorded either six specific words, or Roger Hargreaves’s classic Mr Tickle*. Recordings are tagged with the place that the speaker grew up in, their age, and their gender. The map is based on the location the recording was made in (not the place the speaker comes from).

There are a lot of ways to look at this information, besides general interest and keeping a record of the way English is spoken todya. I read an interesting article about the fact that British accents aren’t being ‘Americanised’ (to be honest, I hadn’t heard that people were worried about the Americanisation of British accents or pronunciation, but apparently some people are). Based on the six words, controversy, garage, neither, scone, schedule, and attitude, investigations have shown that British people are definitely still pronouncing words differently from Americans. It’s interesting to note, though, that there is a tendency for British pronunciations to change, while American pronunciation remains the same.

The project also includes a lot of recordings from non-native speakers of English, which may help linguists to predict the direction of English pronunciation in the future.

The Voice Map project is on for a couple more days if you want to participate (you will need to have or register for an Audioboo account). If you’re interested in my recording, click here. If you want to explore the voice map, click here.

*Click here to learn more about why this book was chosen.

I’m sure it’s happened to most people before: you meet someone with a new, interesting, or strong accent, and somewhere in your conversation with them, you feel yourself start slipping into an (often awful) imitation of their speech. When you realise you’re doing it, you feel like a bit of an idiot, and you hope they haven’t noticed.

So, it turns out that accent imitation, besides being used for intentional and accidental mockery of others, can actually help you to understand the speaker’s accent. A study in the Netherlands has shown that if accented speech is repeated, it helps the listener to better understand it.

The participants in the study were first asked to listen to an unfamiliar accent of Dutch. To ensure that the accent was unfamiliar to everyone, the researchers made up a new accent by doing a consistent vowel sound change. After this, the participants were asked to listen to 100 sentences in the unfamiliar accent. Participants were asked to respond to the sentences in different ways: some repeated the sentence aloud while trying to mimic the new accent, some repeated it in their own accent, some transcribed the sentence, and some only listened. When the sentences were tested again, those that had repeated using the unfamiliar accent did far better than the other groups.

Unfortunately, in real life, even if you know this information it’s not very polite to talk to someone while trying to imitate their speech patterns. I suppose if you really wanted to, you could always use this study as justification.

Full article: Science Daily.

I’d heard that people are more likely to believe a person who speaks with the same accent as them (meaning people will be more likely to think that foreigners are untrustworthy*), and another study has shown some interesting results when comparing listener reactions to different accents.

The study, conducted at the University of Glasgow, used fMRI scans to analyse brain activity in Scottish listeners when they heard people speaking in American, English**, and Scottish accents. Participants listened to recordings of nine different female voices: three of each of American, English, and Scottish accents. The research found that brain activity was significantly different between listening to a native accent and a foreign one (even though all were speaking the same language).

“The pattern of neural activity differed strikingly in response to their own specific accent compared with other English accents,” Bestelmeyer said. “The initial results suggest that such vocal samples somehow reflect group membership or social identity, so that ‘in-group’ voices are processed differently from the ‘out-group.’”

My impression is that it takes a bit more work to understand a foreign accent, which would mean that people might unintentionally seek out people who speak in the same way, as it’s easier on the brain. However, I don’t think that this is necessarily related to in-group and out-group issues. It’s logical that a person finds it easier to understand the speech they have heard all their lives. What do you think?

Article: Science Daily.

*I wonder what kind of Google searches will be drawn in by this phrase.
**The article uses ‘British’, but I chose to use ‘English’, as that’s what I assume they meant (Scottish accents are also British accents).

I posted this on the Australian and New Zealand LT blog, with reference to my New Zealand accent, but I thought it was too funny not to post here as well. I’ve had some problems with voice recognition myself, but not as many as you’d think. Do any of you have strong regional accents that computers have trouble understanding?

In my last post I wrote about native speakers not knowing that language learners are not fluent.  I’ve experienced it many times when I have learned basic phrases in a language to be polite, and then have found myself apologising for not actually being able to speak the language.

So, is it beneficial for beginners to speak with a strong accent?  It gives the listener an instant clue that the speaker is not a native, and they can then (hopefully) modulate their language to suit the speaker’s level.  This saves you from having to explain that you are a student or that you don’t understand.

I’ve spoken to a few people about this, and opinions differ.  Speaking slowly or with a strong accent may benefit the learner in that the listener will modify their speech, but you can’t speak too haltingly, or ‘incorrectly’, or you may not be understood at all.  Most people don’t think that learners should actually try to speak with a strong accent (though some kind of accent is inevitable).

What do you think?

In the kind of news story that you wouldn’t even believe if it were in a Hollywood film, a woman from Devon started speaking in new accents after complaining of severe migraines.

She initially spoke in a Chinese accent for about a week, and then woke up speaking in a more Eastern-European sounding accent (apparent in the video below).  Unfortunately there’s no evidence of the Chinese accent; I would have been really interested to see what that sounded like.

Clearly she has had some kind of brain episode affecting her speech areas, as she makes some grammatical errors as well as the perceived accent change.  As she mentions in the video, she is unsure how long it will last for.  Apparently some people who suffer this kind of change recover after some time.

It’s nice that her mental capacity seems unchanged, although I think it would frustrate me no end to have people think I was a bit simple because of the way I spoke!

Source: Sky News.