Language Trainers Blog

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?

At a recent TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) conference, an interesting point was brought up about the learning of English. Dr Peter Waters, from German University of Technology in Oman (GUtech), presented “Sounds: Avenues for Language Learning”, a presentation about English pronunciation. He addressed the common problem of students not being trained to understand just the sounds of English (rather than how words are spelled).

There are far fewer sounds in English than there are ways to spell them, and this inconsistency often brings up problems for English learners. But what if the spelling part took a back seat to the pronunciation? For most people, communication is the first priority, so I think that for people who use mostly spoken English, this focus could be very useful.

There is also the problem that for many learners, the audio content they receive is ‘standard’ English. Unfortunately, if you have spent your whole learning career listening to people speak like the Queen of England, you won’t understand when ‘normal’ English speakers talk to you.

Luckily, there are a lot of websites these days that provide a wide range of pronunciations. I think the sooner learners hear more variance in their audio, the better for their chances of successful communication.

Full article: Zawya.com.

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.

Chinese New Year, or Spring Festival, is starting this week. The biggest celebration of the Chinese calendar, it is a time for families to get together and ring in a prosperous new year. Many of the traditions associated with the festival have grown up around words that sound like each other. The Chinese are big on wordplay, which is totally fine by me. For example, it is common to eat fish and leave some for the new year, because the Chinese word for fish, 鱼 (yu2),has the same pronunciation as the word for surplus, 余. So if you say the phrase 年年有余兔 (nian2 nian2 you3 yu2), meaning ‘may there be surpluses every year’, it sounds exactly like 年年有鱼, ‘may there be fish every year’.

There’s also been a really interesting crossover of these double meanings using English and Chinese. A couple of years ago it was the year of the ox, or 牛 (niu2, which sounds a lot like the English word ‘new’). Greetings of ‘Happy 牛 Year’ abounded. Now that it is almost the year of the rabbit (兔, or tu2), I’ve seen ‘Happy New Year 兔 you’. I think it’s very creative and linguistically interesting. I wonder what people will come up with for the other zodiac animals!

I’ve found that a lot of native English speakers, when speaking to other native English speakers, say foreign words in a blatantly Anglicised way. This seems to happen even when the speaker can speak the foreign language quite well. I don’t know if it is because they feel uncomfortable ‘trying too hard’, or for another reason. I generally try to use the correct pronunciation, or my best approximation, but many other people don’t.

A friend brought up a good point, though. For words that are commonly used in English, we use the English version. Unless you are French, saying Paris as Paree will make you look fairly pretentious to other English speakers.

There has to be a middle ground somewhere, though. Somewhere where you are not a poseur but not being offensive to speakers of the foreign language. Where do you think that line is?

I’ve recently found the website Wordnik, which I would struggle just to call an online dictionary. It not only collects definitions from well-known dictionaries, but it provides example phrases and sentences (including online publications, blogs, and tweets), pronunciations, tags, statistics, and a strong user-generated component. It even gives you the potential Scrabble score (if it is a valid Scrabble word). People can create lists of words based around themes, so if you look up a word, you can immediately see what other words and phrases it is commonly found with. There is also a pretty well-used comments feature.

For example, I clicked random word, and got raptured. Raptured, meaning in a state of rapture, has a Scrabble score of 11, was most popular in the early 1800s (and the present, possibly because of religious connotations), and has one related photo on Flickr.

For prescriptivists, Wordnik‘s resident pronunciation specialist (or orthoepist) provides his own pronunciations for nearly 1800 words (to date), and for descriptivists, any member of the site can upload their own audio. Edit: if you’d like orthoepist Charles Harrington Elster to pronounce something for you, add your word to The Request Line.

For the average dictionary user, this may be far too much information, but for those of us who are interested in seeing how language is used today (and how it was used in the past), this is a wonderful resource. I’d be interested to see if the concept will be extended to other languages, as well.

Check out the Zeitgeist to see what’s happening on the site. As of today:

Wordnik is billions of words, 828,852,001 example sentences, 6,458,204 unique words, 209,445 comments, 146,866 tags, 76,745 pronunciations, 46,119 favorites and 864,672 words in 27,830 lists created by 60,337 Wordniks.

I usually don’t have a problem getting around in taxis and having basic conversations in Chinese. Apparently my pronunciation is generally pretty good, even though I sometimes still have problems with differentiating the tones. So I was kind of surprised to find a street name that taxi drivers almost never understand when I tell them. It’s not a small street, and it even has a subway station with the same name. It also happens to be the street that I now live on.

I said the street name over and over again in my head, looked up the tones to make sure I was getting them right, but no matter how much I practised (in my head and out loud), as soon as I say it to a taxi driver, he has no idea what I’m talking about, and I get really flustered. Maybe I’ve just started saying it with a sort of hopeful lift at the end, which is definitely not the tone I’m going for. Even worse, they understand it when my boyfriend clarifies, and he barely speaks two words of Chinese.

I know I’m just going to have to keep at it until I get over the mental block I’ve now put in front of the words, but in the meantime, it’s a bit of a struggle to get home. Maybe I’ll just have to start taking the bus.

Though it is finding fewer and fewer students in its native India, the ancient language of Sanskrit is finding young enthusiasts in the UK.

Student enrolment in the Sanskrit program has been increasing at St James Junior School in London.  Teachers are very supportive of the course, which has been running since 1975.  Although the language itself is rarely spoken any more, it has formed the basis for many Indian classical writings, and teachers say that these provide philosophical and inspirational materials for children to learn from.  Speaking the language, even though it may be quite difficult for native English speakers, can give students a linguistic grounding that will help with their English diction as well.

The students appear to be as enthusiastic as the teachers, which is inspiring.  Even though the script and pronunciation might be challenging, they enjoy it because it is different.  They are more than happy to take the opportunity to learn it, because not many people get to these days.

Full article: NDTV.

I’ve been listening to Italians speak to each other for the last couple of days and I love the ups and downs of the language that are the result of putting the stress on specific syllables in the word. In fact, if you don’t put the stress on the correct part of the word, some people may not understand you at all, even if you do get the actual word right. Most of the time, the stress is on the second to last syllable of the word, even with long words, e.g. cappuccino, panino. There’s also a lot of ‘r’ rolling, which may be hard for some people to get used to. It may be especially difficult for speakers of some Asian languages, which don’t really have ‘r’ sounds in the first place.

I think the best way to make yourself understood is to try to sound as much like a stereotypical Italian as possible. You may think it’s silly, or even offensive, but if you spend some time listening to Italians speak to each other, you will see that they are as expressive as they appear in films and on TV. It may mean making your voice go up and down more often than you’re used to, and speaking with your hands (Italians do this a lot), but it will help. Let your voice and hands go a little, and see if you can pronounce this beautiful language like an enthusiastic native!

One of the exercises my teacher likes to do with me is to get me to tell her about my day, or my weekend, or what I want to do in the near future.  It helps me practice speaking and writing (i.e., creating output) about things that are relevant and familiar to me, as well as focusing on useful language and grammar.

Talking about what you did on the weekend helps with past tenses, next week is for future, current habits practice present continuous.  You can use the subjunctive (if… situations) by imagining what you would have done if you had made a different choice or if something else happened (e.g. if I missed the bus this morning, I would have…).

If you don’t have a person to give you feedback, there are plenty of websites where other users will correct your work (e.g. LiveMocha, Lang-8), and you can correct theirs.  Alternatively, you could start a blog of your diary entries and invite readers to give you some advice about improving your writing and/or speaking.  You could also write about your language learning experiences.

What kind of output exercises do you like to do?