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+--- Thread: A Norwegian guy speaking Japanese? (/thread-8456.html)
A Norwegian guy speaking Japanese? - AlexandreC - 2011-09-27
TwoMoreCharacters Wrote:You need to speak for it to work.AlexandreC Wrote:Most of what Zorlee has listed in his opening post doesn't include audio and he confirmed he didn't note pitch on his SRS, so he acquired his accent during his stay in Japan.That's a pretty big assumption to make! So hearing Japanese everyday for a year has no effect? You need to listen to Japanese while being in Japan for it to work?
A Norwegian guy speaking Japanese? - TwoMoreCharacters - 2011-09-27
Of course, eventually! My thinking is that if by the time you meet Japanese people and start speaking you've had great amounts of listening to the language done, you can be used to something like the pitches and intonations of the individual words you've heard thousands of times.
vonPeterhof, you wrote on the last page that despite being unaware of the kinds of pitches or stresses English uses compared to Russian, you were still pronouncing it all right because you were imitating native speakers' accents. Is that not because you've heard so much of those accents they kind of sink into your head? You're used to what English is supposed to sound like, and when you speak yourself you follow that?
Sorry for sticking in like this, but I was sort of ticked off when zorlee's claim to have listened to Japanese for pretty much hours every day for about a year without speaking (?) was ignored, and it was concluded that his well-raised accent must be the simple result of him speaking while being in Japan.
A Norwegian guy speaking Japanese? - drdunlap - 2011-09-27
The "Japan is a magical elixir that ups Japanese power" myth is too deeply-rooted to destroy now.
It can certainly help to make the process less painful (as you no longer have to look hard at all to find Japanese), but one could just as easily flood themselves with Japanese outside of Japan (as did Zorlee and many others).
That having been said..
There are simply two sides to the accent equation. One is knowing what you're supposed to sound like. The other is getting your muscles used to making those sounds. The former is, without question, far and away more important. The latter is also essential but plays a bigger role in fine tuning. Should you at least get your mouth used to the noises? Maybe. Probably. But I don't think I would have been very happy attempting to actually speak from day one. When I began to speak Japanese I was immediately complimented on my accent. Not because I or my muscles were used to it, I'd hardly ever spoken before (much less held a conversation), but because I more or less had a good grasp of what I was supposed to sound like from having listened to Japanese being spoken for a considerable amount of time. Overwhelming amounts of input can also lead the learner to be able to guess at what an unheard string of words should sound like. It's not like native speakers, much less we who are learning the language as a foreign language, will hear every possible phrase and, from that, learn how to say it properly.
When to start speaking is largely dependent on the learner and his/her preference. There's plenty of people who started speaking day 1 and are great at accents. There are plenty of people who hardly spoke at all for a year or two and suddenly had good accents. Saying which is "right" seems silly. Much like attempting to find "the universal perfect study method" is silly. Zorlee's method was "flood self with Japanese outside of Japan then go get complimented." :]
There's (at least) one universal truth in language learning- keep in touch with the language as it is used by natives of that language as much as is possible and you, too, should one day come to understand the language as they do. -- The actual steps of the process must, to some degree, fit the individual.
A Norwegian guy speaking Japanese? - vonPeterhof - 2011-09-27
TwoMoreCharacters Wrote:vonPeterhof, you wrote on the last page that despite being unaware of the kinds of pitches or stresses English uses compared to Russian, you were still pronouncing it all right because you were imitating native speakers' accents. Is that not because you've heard so much of those accents they kind of sink into your head? You're used to what English is supposed to sound like, and when you speak yourself you follow that?It is true. However, I only started getting the pitch right after years of listening and speaking practise (and, since I was apparently doing it unconsciously, I have no idea at what point I started getting it right). On the other hand, stress was on my mind since day one. I have met many other Russians who spoke English with horrible accents, and misplaced stress tended to be the least of their problems, unlike people whose native languages have fixed stress (e.g. French and Polish) or no stress (e.g. Georgian and Japanese). My guess was that if someone's native language has pitch accent then they would be more likely to pay deliberate attention to relative pitch when learning another language, just like I did with unfixed stress. But in the end those features do end up sinking into your head, even if you don't pay much attention to them at first.
A Norwegian guy speaking Japanese? - SammyB - 2011-09-28
drdunlap Wrote:There's (at least) one universal truth in language learning- keep in touch with the language as it is used by natives of that language as much as is possible and you, too, should one day come to understand the language as they do. -- The actual steps of the process must, to some degree, fit the individual.drdunlap,
Might I say that you come across as a particularly level-headed individual. And, everything you say is solid gold.
Please stick around.
A Norwegian guy speaking Japanese? - AlexandreC - 2011-09-28
vonPeterhof Wrote:But in the end those features do end up sinking into your head, even if you don't pay much attention to them at first.A few months ago, I had a discussion with Steve Kaufmann. After living in Japan how many years and speaking Japanese for how many decades, Steve, a polyglot par excellence, didn't know anything about pitch, and didn't even know it existed. Not surprisingly, his pitch is less than stellar (though this is not a reflection on his skills otherwise). You said you were thinking about stress from day 1 and continued to work on it for years through listening and speaking, and yet, your language had a similar feature. In other words, pitch doesn't just fix itself over time -- you need to deliberately work at it, even more so if your first language doesn't have pitch.
A Norwegian guy speaking Japanese? - nadiatims - 2011-09-28
Keep in mind Steve Kauffman learned japanese and lived in Japan back in the 70s iirc. His accent will have deteriorated a little in the last 30 years...
I don' think it's necessary to intellectualise pronunciation so much, just try to speak Japanese how you hear it. As you accumulate more listening practice and a better understanding of Japanese, you start to recognise where your own accent differs from the people around you and can start consciously and unconsciously self correcting. At least this has been my experience. Reading about pitch accent didn't improve my accent, listening to a lot of Japanese has. I've also met a lot of Japanese people who have worked on their accents in an artificial manner, and end exaggerating everything and sounding unnatural. Whereas every Japanese person I've known who has spent a significant amount of time overseas (= a lot of exposure to real English) have significantly better accents.
A Norwegian guy speaking Japanese? - AlexandreC - 2011-09-28
nadiatims Wrote:As you accumulate more listening practice and a better understanding of Japanese, you start to recognise where your own accent differs from the people around you and can start consciously and unconsciously self correcting.This raises an interesting point: do you think everyone is equally capable of recognizing differences between their speech and that of those around them, and then self-correct?
A Norwegian guy speaking Japanese? - Angeldust - 2011-09-28
Zorlee, thanks for the post and the video. It was really helpful.
It seems this whole thing boils down to: Imitate!
Simple, but it can be difficult.
AlexandreC Wrote:I'm not an expert or anything, but I think you could. But I think you'd have to be really aware of how you and others said things.nadiatims Wrote:As you accumulate more listening practice and a better understanding of Japanese, you start to recognise where your own accent differs from the people around you and can start consciously and unconsciously self correcting.This raises an interesting point: do you think everyone is equally capable of recognizing differences between their speech and that of those around them, and then self-correct?
A Norwegian guy speaking Japanese? - magamo - 2011-09-28
I think there are two things going on when talking about the "melody" of language. One is prosody, which encompasses rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech. And the other is linguistic tone such as Chinese tone and Japanese pitch accent. These are different concepts, and theoretically speaking, you can be good at one but terrible at the other. So, while some posters speculated that the fact that Norwegian is a pitch-accented language might have helped Zorlee's accent, I'm not sure if that made huge difference, at least in the prosody department. Besides, English also has pitch accent, though it doesn't necessarily qualify the language as a pitch-accented one. If you dismiss pitch accent in English, some other learners who posted on IceCream's thread are also quite good at accent, e.g., Nuriko speaks American English natively, and IceCream is British. I don't remember who speaks which language as their native tongue, but I think you can find similar cases with nonnative English speakers.
In any case, it seems there is a certain trend in prosody and pitch accent among Japanese learners. In my experience, learners who learned through audio input from the get go or at a very early stage tend to be good at both prosody and pitch accent, often reaching near-native level or close to it way before grammar and vocabulary become decent. And learners who learned Japanese mainly through reading at first are significantly worse at them and having trouble correcting themselves later on as if their accents got "fixed." Looking at my friends living in Japan, getting a lot of native input later or consciously working on accent doesn't seem to work very well for most of such "fixed" learners either, though it doesn't mean you can never fix it. I see the same thing happening among English learners. I could be wrong on this one, though, because I'm not a native speaker.
Either way, it seems to me that if you already developed your own version of prosody (and pitch accent), you can't quite get rid of it or acquire a new accent easily. At least it seems almost certain that it requires huge time and effort to modify accent later while it's not that difficult to develop a very good accent if that's your first one for the language. Also, it seems like learners with fixed accents can't even hear pitch or prosodic patters in the first place when they're transparent to people with native or native-like accents.
A similar thing happens to native Japanese speakers. If you didn't learn the kind of pitch accent and prosody used in, say, Tokyo as a kid, it takes a huge amount of time and effort to acquire the dialect even if you move to Tokyo. Many speakers of regional dialects who didn't learn the standard accent when they're young fail to master it if they try very hard. Since it's quite difficult for native speakers, I wouldn't be surprised if it's even harder for nonnative speakers.
An interesting thing I noticed is that, if you're good at prosody and pitch accent, you sound like you "speak" Japanese the same way as native speakers regardless of your grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. If anything, even random gibberish sounds like Japanese. Of course, no one can make any sense of gibberish. But it does sound like you're speaking the same language as mine. On the other hand, if you screw up prosody too much, native speakers may fail to realize you're speaking Japanese even if you speak with perfect grammar and impeccable vocabulary. I lost the link, but I've watched a video where a learner studying for level 2 JLPT speaks like your average Japanese high schooler with a hardly noticeable foreign accent. And we all know there are "advanced" learners out there who can't communicate very well.
I think everyone agrees that you can develop good grammar and build large vocabulary regardless of whether you initially learned language mainly from audio or text. And it seems to become harder and harder to acquire a native-like accent if you ignore native audio input. The longer you delay listening to native material, the harder it becomes to acquire a new accent, it seems. Maybe it can become impossible to fix your accent anymore if you've gone too far; it may take longer than your lifespan.
Most of what I just wrote is a mere speculation. There must be counterexamples out there too. But maybe it's not bad to focus mainly on prosody and pitch accent for the first few years (I heard fixing your pronunciation later was a lot easier than modifying your prosody, and I totally agree with that.). If you're serious enough to want to speak like a native speaker, you already know that it's going to take decades to reach that level in terms of grammar and vocabulary. So, a couple years isn't too much of an investment for those serious learners, I think. Don't blame me if it doesn't work for you though! All of these are baseless and not backed up by science, language gurus or your favorite God.
A Norwegian guy speaking Japanese? - TheVinster - 2012-01-11
Bumping this thread to ask a question (but even then, more people need to see such a great thread). Right now I'm reading mangas and mining words and I'm actually going to do KO2001 sentences on the side in a separate Anki deck. In other words I'll have a deck for my vocabulary and a deck for sentences, which will be strictly KO2001 for now. Is it simple enough to have the Japanese sentence on the front and the English translation on the back? If I'm doing sentences that sounds about right. That's what you did Zorlee?
A Norwegian guy speaking Japanese? - AlexandreC - 2012-01-11
magamo Wrote:In my experience, learners who learned through audio input from the get go or at a very early stage tend to be good at both prosody and pitch accent, often reaching near-native level or close to it way before grammar and vocabulary become decent. And learners who learned Japanese mainly through reading at first are significantly worse at them and having trouble correcting themselves later on as if their accents got "fixed."How can we know whether the learners became good because of the way they chose to study, or if they opted for a given method because of their innate abilities?
A Norwegian guy speaking Japanese? - Zorlee - 2012-06-19
I've been getting a lot of e-mails lately but I haven't been able to answer back since I'm currently working full time as a translator.
Anyway, a lot of members have been asking me things like "Can you actually use your Japanese in real conversations?" "Do you have more audio of you talking?" "I've heard you introduce yourself, but can you actually communicate with natives?" etc etc.
To be honest, speaking is the weakest part of my Japanese. I'm working hard on improving it, currently studying pitch accent and just started using "self talk". I really have to thank AlexandreC for all the great posts he has written - it has really motivated me to keep on improving.
Back to the questions. Yes, I can communicate. And yes, I actually found a recording of me taking an ocarina lesson in Kobe last month. I was nervous as hell (the teacher I had is like the greatest ocarina player on earth!), so my Japanese was a bit shaky, but I think you get the idea. I made silly mistakes, but I do think we communicated well. And as an added bonus you can hear me play 情熱大陸 on a triple ocarina at the end of the clip! (Sloppy version, but hey - you get to hear this for free!
)http://chirb.it/zty7Pr
EDIT: I've edited out some boring talk about technique etc, so the conversation might not make a lot of sense, but...
A Norwegian guy speaking Japanese? - yowamushi - 2012-06-20
Zorlee Wrote:I've been getting a lot of e-mails lately and I haven't been able to answer back since I'm currently working full time as a translator.So you are currently working as a translator for Japanese? That would be great, after only three years of studying the language!
.
A Norwegian guy speaking Japanese? - Zorlee - 2012-06-20
No, I'm currently working as a technical translator between English and Norwegian
A Norwegian guy speaking Japanese? - yowamushi - 2012-06-20
Jaså! Men det er også bra!!
A Norwegian guy speaking Japanese? - Zorlee - 2012-06-20
Haha! Det er i alle fall gøy
Håper å kunne oversette japansk i fremtiden også, men vi får se...!
A Norwegian guy speaking Japanese? - yowamushi - 2012-06-20
Jeg er også oversetter. Fransk og tysk. Jeg vil også gjerne arbeide som oversetter for japansk! Men det blir vanskelig! Som du sier, vi får se!
A Norwegian guy speaking Japanese? - Lavasioth - 2012-06-20
As a fellow Norwegian I was wondering if there were any specific problems you encountered that seemed to be difficult due to the propeties of your own native language. (if anything)
The only obvious one I can think of at the top of my head is s/z distinction where Norwegian doesn't have the Z sound (some dialects might have it.) which makes pronounciation of z sounds to be somewhat troublesome.
A Norwegian guy speaking Japanese? - Zorlee - 2012-06-20
yowamushi: Så gøy! Maybe you can teach me a thing or two about translating
Lavasioth: Hmm... The s/z thing is the only one I can think of right now. I still struggle a bit with the pronunciation of words like "tsuzukeru" (sorry, can't write Japanese right now), because of the tsu + zu combination. Uansett, kjekt å se andre nordmenn her!
A Norwegian guy speaking Japanese? - turvy - 2012-06-20
Hei, I was just checking this thread and looking at some of your older threads, you were from 0 to that video in like a year and a half. I hate you, I mean I applaud you, amazing.
I would love to hear how was that transition from nothing to a lot during that year or so.
A Norwegian guy speaking Japanese? - IceCream - 2012-06-20
Zorlee..... your ocarina is ju---uust somethin' else now. Where can i come n see you play a whole set??
A Norwegian guy speaking Japanese? - Inny Jan - 2012-06-20
Zorlee has been listed, blacklisted, x-rayed, indexed, referenced and cross-referenced... and here is what it took him to get where he is now.
A Norwegian guy speaking Japanese? - bbvoncrumb - 2012-06-22
Am I missing something, don't you need a sub file for subs2srs? Where did you get subs (either Japanese or English) for london hearts and other variety shows?
A Norwegian guy speaking Japanese? - AlexandreC - 2012-06-22
Zorlee Wrote:I'm working hard on improving it, currently studying pitch accent and just started using "self talk". I really have to thank AlexandreC for all the great posts he has written - it has really motivated me to keep on improving.I was unaware of that.
You are most welcome.