I have also read that retention of a "foreign" accent by an expat may be partly psychological. It's a way of saying that "Even if I am an expat, in my heart I'm still a Home Country person."
And it can be more complicated than that. I doubt that Henry Kissinger retains a lot of affection for Germany. And I suspect that if had gone into selling used cars instead of his chosen career path, his accent would be barely noticeable. But in academia a foreign accent may be no bad thing.
#6 the French, with their very specific "r"
That would be the uvular trill, I presume? However, while this sound almost certainly has its origins in French and is very characteristic of that language, it's also quite common among native speakers of German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian (yours truly not excluded) - yet of all these it is, in my experience, only the French who habitually fail to suspend the trill when speaking English, which is very interesting (and quite strange).
W.
Surely the muscles in our mouths and vocal cords take on specific characteristics if we speak only one language as children, hence the difficulty for adults.
Yes, bjd has identified part of the problem: practice makes perfect, so we are able to produce the sounds of our own language but do less well at reproducing sounds we haven't made before. We may actually think that we can't reproduce them; when I studied Russian, one of the young women in the class, a native of southern Illinois, could not pronounce the letter X. She would say "ha" rather than "kha," and she insisted that the cause was an anatomical difference among what she called different races.
Nutrax hit the target on the other part of language learning: hearing the sounds; that is, distinguishing one sound from another than might be quite like it. Most of us lose our ability to distinguish sounds from languages not our own fairly early.
I've found listening closely to tapes with headphones, to really focus on the accent, helps but even after many years I can't roll my r's reliably, whereas people I've studied with who's first language is Spanish, Italian, French or German find it effortless. I think that's an instance where it's something you learn as a child that is very hard to physically master as an adult.
nutrax, #9, I agree with you completely. I find many, many folks trying to learn Spanish just don't/¿can't? hear some of the different sounds/ sonidas+ /phonemes used in Spanish (vs. English). One that I use to "try out" folk's hearing is the difference between +pene+ and +peine</i> . It's amazing how many native English speakers (even after having lived in México for years) can't hear the difference between these two words. Makes for some funny misunderstandings too!
And very obviously, if they can't hear the difference, they can't pronounce one or the other properly, since they will pronounce them exactly the same.
Although Spanish has only about half the phonemes that English has, some of them are non-existent in English (and usually very difficult for native English speakers to hear/pronounce) and the others are very "clipped" compared to English.
Edited by: mazgringo
Easiest language to learn to read - has to be Bulgarian.
They only write exactly what they say,
So for example, 'Lonely Planet' would be 'Lonli Planit'.
'Thorn tree' is.. 'Thun Tri.'
'Batty Billy' is.. Bati Bili.
Bet you're on top of it already.
Beats trying to master Icelandic ! !
#15 Surely Bulgarian uses the Cyrillic alphabet?
Any language that writes phonetically would be easy to read, once you have learned the pronunciation of each letter. This holds for Polish, for example, despite the number of Z's in the words. I guess for the other Slavic languages too.
Any language that writes phonetically would be easy to read, once you have learned the pronunciation of each letter
The Maori language is very easy to spell for that reason as well. Actually no, the one problem is that even some native speakers do not pronounce certain words correctly (eg towns, placenames, peoples names) so it is harder when the words are mispronounced.
But essentially, yes. Quite straightforward to spell as long as you know how to pronounce the words.
*16.... Yes Bulgaria uses the Cyrillic alphabet. I was writing it as it's pronounced in our alphabet.
I guess they would be pronounced in Cyrillic....
"Th" doesn't exist in Bulgarian, so it would be pronounced "Torn Tri" or they may substitute 'F" for "Th'.
Therefore it could be written.... "Фyн Три"
"Batty Billy is.. "Бъти Били".
Is that correct as you see it? I'm still quite new at both Cyrillic and Bulgarian - but slowly getting there.
Actually no, the one problem is that even some native speakers do not pronounce certain words correctly (eg towns, placenames, peoples names) so it is harder when the words are mispronounced.
Towns, placenames and peoples' names all would have existed before being written, so the problem might be more that they were written down wrongly in the first place. (or by people with different pronunciations, as happened in NZ )
Бъти Били
Бaти Били - surely?