You have listened to the English accents of speakers of your language, and most of you have commented. Good work.
Just as in our school, there are far more speakers of English who are not native-speakers, than native-speakers. This means that to communicate with English speakers around the world you must be able to understand dozens of different accents. In our school you've only had to understand standard American, Canadian, British; Japanese, Korean and Arabic, and a few other accents. Can you understand others?
Go back to the accents website to listen to native speakers. Also listen to the non-native accents you are going to hear most in future: Chinese, Hindi (India), German, French, Russian and Swahili (East Africa). How easy or difficult was it for you to understand these people?
Make comments to this post: several thoughtful sentences please.
If accents is strange, I can't understand because I feel they speak their language.
ReplyDeleteThis is correct in a way, since people tend to use the sounds of their own language in second-languages, unless they were able to learn the sounds in other languages when they were very young. We can make ourselves understood as adult learners, but it is hard to have no accent.
DeleteI think Chinese people hard to spell [s]. Hindi people accent well. But I think they hard to pronounce [a]. And they accents [r] strong. German people spell [p] soft. I think German people's accents are good. French people pronounce [he] to [r]. And their [a] accents are strange. Russian pronounce [c] or [ll] strange. They spells [th] strong. Some Russian's accents are good. Swahili's accents are good but i think little bit strange. I can't choose which part is strange.
ReplyDeleteWow! Excellent analysis. I wonder if German accents are clearest. If so it makes sense as both English and German are Germanic languages. The accent I find nearest to native English is Danish (also Germanic). You should listen to it.
DeleteI think they mixed their language in English.
ReplyDeleteI think this native accent is really good for me because i understood which teacher speaks which accent? I found these questions easily.
ReplyDeleteI am not sure what you mean. Did you listen to other languages' speakers?
DeleteIndians are good speaking at English compare to other countries. However, other are stuck in "r" word.
ReplyDeleteEnglish is not the official language of India: Hindi is. However, most Indians are not Hindi speakers: it is a language of just one area of India's north. English is often the language Indians use to communicate with each other, because of India's history as part of the British Empire.
DeleteIndia people's are always same voice, and some Chinese can't pronoun 'r' sound. Some Russian mixed there language, so it is hard to understand. Tunis person input 'the' when he pronounce, German didn't pronoun 'r ' sound sometimes, Swahili's pronounce has error I think, but I don't know what is problem.
ReplyDeleteSwahili is interesting as it is mixture of languages in a way.
DeleteI would not say the other languages you mention "can't pronounce the 'r' sound", nor would I say Koreans cannot; I would say that each of these languages has their own 'r', but that each is different from English's, and each other's.
from all the six countries the best one of speaking English is German. about all others they have a few words that they can't spell it right, but i think it's not about the country, it's only about the same person who speaks English.
ReplyDeleteSee what I said about Danish, above comment. It's even closer than German.
DeleteI think that the french people pronounce (th) D, they don't pronounce R and it's easy to understand their accent. the Chinese accent is hard to understand because some of them pronounce (i)-ee and they don't pronounce R. the German accent is the best accent that i heard and it easy to understand. the Russian accent is the hardest accent because their language is very different from English.
ReplyDeleteCorrect about French especially. Everyone finds the German accent closest to native English, which makes sense because of the connected histories of the languages. You should listen to Danes!
DeleteI listened several speaker and I compared.
ReplyDeleteGerman was easy to understand about pronouncing, because it was mostly same as English I think. Comparing opposite of German, Russian is hard to understand it.
When I listened about Russian pronunciation, most of their people are speaking slow and stopped for a second.
The rest of speaking was not that hard to understand while I just listened.But as my opinion, most of their speaking tone was little different also.
S-J, I think you have the right idea. See what I have said in comments above about the German accent.
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