Re: Quadrilingual
From: Peter Dy (peterdy_at_sbcglobal.net)
Date: 09/21/04
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Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2004 00:32:23 GMT
"Tor" <tor826@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:9ac42c18.0409191628.760d89b2@posting.google.com...
[...]
> When I was in my twenties, I studied Spanish intensively for six years
> and had many Spanish-speaking friends, most of whom were Chilean. I
> became so fluent and my pronunciation became so good that on a visit
> to Chile, people were surprised to find out that I wasn't Chilean or
> at least Hispanic.
Could you elaborate? How much conversation did you have before they found
out you weren't from Chile? You'd think the fact that you were on a trip
from a foreign country and were there for the first time would have come up
early in conversations?
In Germany, I used chat a bit with a co-worker after her class finished and
before mine was to begin. This was only once a week. After about 4 such
encounters, she asked where I was from, and was shocked to discover I was
American; she had thought I was German. What I took from that, was simply
that my German accent was quite good. I feel there simply had not been
enough exchange between us to conclude that I had a perfectly native accent.
If I had invited her to talk over a coffee, which I probably should have
done since she was cute, I think she would have quickly discovered through
my accent that I was not a native speaker.
[...]
It seems to me that although
> there is indeed a difference in language acquisition between an infant
> and an adult, most linguists exaggerate it, and that they vastly
> exaggerate the difference in second-language learning ability between
> a child and an adult. If you compare a 4-year-old and an 18-year-old
> that are both being taught a second language, the brain of the
> 4-year-old may be more flexible and open to learning, but the
> 18-year-old has enough knowledge of his first language and enough
> self-discipline to learn in a more intensive and efficient way. The
> 18-year-old may indeed have an advantage over a 70-year-old if age is
> the only difference between them, but the advantage is not huge.
But this was not argued in that thread, as far as I recall. Indeed, I've
read that studies show that adults do learn L2 better than children, unless
perhaps the latter are in an immersion-type setting. That other thread was
discussing differences in L1 learning.
[...]
> But interference from a dominant language is not the only reason why
> adults speaking a new language tend to have accents even when they
> have studied hard. There is at least one additional reason. As
> Mxsmanic pointed out in passing, a person's identity is often tied to
> his accent. I know several French people here in Maryland who have
> admitted to me that although they want to speak English fluently
> without thick accents, they don't really want to speak without any
> accent at all. They are very proud of being French, and quite often,
> speaking with a French accent is the only way for them to signal their
> Frenchness.
I don't think anyone disagrees with that. In that other thread, it was
argued that pre-pubescents need to exert basically no effort in acquiring a
perfectly native accent, where as with an adult, it's not at all the case.
Peter
[...]
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