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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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It is not uncommon for someone who has had a stroke to lose their second language(s) but not their first. I have even had a patient who had not spoken French since age 5 (moved to an English speaking area) and whose English was indistinguishable from the English only speakers around her. She woke up from a stroke fluent in French but with no knowledge of English. This suggests to me that there is actually a different area of the brain involved.
At almost 70 she started English classes and her husband of 45 years started learning French.
Pook, you mentioned that anyone can learn not to have an accent. Anyone can learn to sing opera too. But it will be a LOT harder for some people than others. One of the problems in language and especially accent learning is that we lose in childhood the ability to distinguish sounds that we do not hear. Is phoneme the work I want for the sounds in a language? Some people have perfect pitch and others have to work at it and others are tone deaf. There is also "an ear for language". The more polyglot the surroundings a child is raised in the better their "ear" will be and the better that child will be at hearing and therefore being able to reproduce foreign languages accurately.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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>One of the problems in language and especially accent learning is that we lose in childhood the ability to distinguish sounds that we do not hear.
That's right. My African foster son came at the age of five and in 4 to 5 months he could talk fluent with his class mates. Now 22 he speaks without a trace of accent. His sister who came in also at five with her Franco-African mother speaks with the accent of her mixed mostly immigrant school.A second sister who was born and raised here also speaks the immigrant schooling accent , because they never had the real native accent at home.
My son grew up only hearing the Dutch accent for his starting years.
I always admire people who can hear which part of a town or country someone comes from.
I remember from a period we often were in contact with Belgian friends one day someone came at the door and on hearing me asked: "are you from Belgium too?" Without noticing I had taken over the softer sound from our Flemish friends.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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One of the problems in language and especially accent learning is that we lose in childhood the ability to distinguish sounds that we do not hear. Is phoneme the work I want for the sounds in a language?
We hear all sorts of sounds, even the ones that are not in our language. That is what accent is, hearing the difference between the phonemes in your language (or dialect) and how non-native speakers pronounce them slightly differently. What happens is that we perceive sounds differently. (For example, most anglophones when they hear the Japanese voiceless bilabial fricative /ɸ/, as in futon, perceive it to be an f or a w).) Acoustically, the t in top, stop and the one in pot all differ slightly from one another, but most native English speakers perceive them as being the same sound or phoneme. Theese different pronunciations of a phoneme are called allophones.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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OP
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the Japanese voiceless bilabial fricative One of the hardest languages to learn from English, or so they say.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Is there a web site that would give me Japanese words spelled out in the English alphabet? I like to watch Ninja Warrior, which has a lot of Japanese; I've decided that the word that sounds like sah must mean now; but in hearing only, meaning I can't tell where one word ends and the next begins, I don't have a hope of picking up any meaning. Every time I've tried to look up such a site, I was given ones with Japanese characters!
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Is there a web site that would give me Japanese words spelled out in the English alphabet?Jim Breen's WWWJDIC Japanese Dictionary Server may help. Technically, it's not the English alphabet. It's the Latin (or Roman) one. The Japanese language can be represented in Latin characters using what is called romaji (or a romanization system). It may take a bit of getting used, and it would probably help to become familiar with the native Japanese phonological syllabary systems ( hiragana and katakana).
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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For the Japanese sounds this is one of the most beautiful movies I have. Just a short trailer, but there are more on that page. Nothing to read, image and sound. Kwaidan of Masaki Kobayashi (ghost stories),I mentioned that movie once before.For words to come it takes a minute. (whole thing 2,5 minutes total) Kwaidan (smuggle this one in, only sideways' related)
Last edited by BranShea; 02/25/08 04:54 PM.
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Anyone can learn not to have an accent. Actors do it all the time. Anyone can learn to do brain surgery. Neurosurgeons do it all the time. Anyone can learn to sing like Celine Dionne. She does it all the time. (^_^)
Last edited by Myridon; 02/25/08 06:53 PM.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Anyone can learn not to have an accent. Actors do it all the time.
And some do it better than others. Some actors can't do a decent accent to save their lives: e.g., Keanu Reeves, Lord Larry Olivier, at opposite ends of the acting spectrum. Some can. Hugh Laurie does an amazing US accent. Some people are natural mimics. A friend of mine taught for a year in Sweden. His accent was near flawless. His grammar and usage were abysmal; he did not speak any Swedish before arriving. When first meeting and listening to him, Swedes were confused. They figured he was a brain-damaged Swede.
[Corrected typo.]
Last edited by zmjezhd; 02/25/08 10:50 PM.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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old hand
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old hand
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Anyone can learn not to have an accent. Actors do it all the time.
And some do it better than others. Some actors can't do a descent accent to save their lives Is that one with a falling inflexion? 
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