Ryuujin27 Wrote:It's not really elitism, and no one here is saying his Japanese sucks. It's really just an issue of accent. I, also, have no idea how someone can possibly live in Japan for so long and still carry such an accent. The only explanation I can think of, excluding the tone deaf, is that they still speak in their native tongue quite often. I noticed this in my time at a university in Japan. When I would be speaking with native and foreigners, when we would all speak in Japanese, those who I never heard speak their mother tongue and those who had no one else there to speak their mother tongue with, were always the most fluent sounding, even when their level of knowledge wasn't the highest. In particular were these two Koreans, who basically sounded like native speakers. Both were high level and never used Korean, even around each other (nor did they know any English).

So, I guess it comes down to how much you do in Japanese and whether or not you mostly (if not totally) eliminate your native language from your daily life.

This solely depends on the environment I guess. If your forced to use japanese daily to survive/work then I'm sure you'd develop an accent after being for a long while. But yea, if you used Japanese and no other language for several years, you'd develop an accent in no-time.

Is speaking Japanese with a foreign accent considered sexy like speaking English with one is?

If we're actually talking about accents and suchlike, you might be interested in the notion of entrenchment: http://psyling.psy.cmu.edu/papers/CM-gen...nified.pdf

See also the bit I posted before that kazelee mentioned on empathy/language ego: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=3733&page=1

Edit: Originally linked to old .pdf, updated model link added, try searching for sections about 'resonance', 'fossilization', 'entrenchment', 'accent', etc.

nest0r Wrote:If we're actually talking about accents and suchlike, you might be interested in the notion of entrenchment: http://psyling.psy.cmu.edu/papers/CM-gen...nified.pdf

"In order to permit the growth of resonance in L2, learners must apply additional learning strategies that would not have been needed for children. These strategies focus primarily on optimization of input, promotion of L2 resonance, and avoidance of processes that destroy input chunks."

SRS, sentences, collocations.

"Through exposure to large amounts of auditory input in L2 that echo in a resonant way on the auditory level, L2 learners can also begin acquisition even before they demonstrate much in the way of independent productive ability."

Create an immersion environment.

But my personal favourite is:

"This same statistical learning mechanism is operative in children, adults, and cotton-top tamarins (Hauser, Newport, & Aslin, 2001)."

I had no idea what a tamarin was (http://chuckpalahniuk.net/forum/1000026/...-metallica), but apparently they could be effectively taught with the methods assembled in this forum. Maybe not Japanese, though.

Actually, careful reading of the article above (assuming most of the theories are confirmed by empirical research) would make a lot of the discussions in this forum about learning/context/sentences/production/J-E vs. J-J/ etc. redundant.

I enjoy them a lot, though, probably because they are a form of procrastination, and being an academic, that's my drug of choice.

Irixmark Wrote:(assuming most of the theories are confirmed by empirical research)

If only.

Irixmark Wrote:Actually, careful reading of the article above (assuming most of the theories are confirmed by empirical research) would make a lot of the discussions in this forum about learning/context/sentences/production/J-E vs. J-J/ etc. redundant.

I enjoy them a lot, though, probably because they are a form of procrastination, and being an academic, that's my drug of choice.

Animal/human studies, computational models, corpus linguistics, neuroscience, all of them point to a general consensus in line with folks like MacWhinney whose theories center and test these emergentist notions, so yes, while in my impression it's only this decade (and that paper is from 2001 I think?), especially the latter half, that linguistics has left its infancy, there's good research supporting it. (It's just not well integrated, though recent papers I've read give me hope.)

Personally I think RevTKers are probably the best group to develop/study and work out theories from. ;p

Here's a good blog that I enjoy citing as a gateway to other blogs, research articles, journals, thinkers, etc: http://www.babelsdawn.com/babels_dawn/

This guy sounds pretty natural to me. I wouldn't think he was a native, but my pronunciation is pretty bad too and I've been abroad forever.

His mora does sound a bit off. Small つs in きっかけ、いっこずつ、うったえてるからetc. don't sound right. But I can't vlog like him and it's pretty impressive.

masaman Wrote:This guy sounds pretty natural to me. But I can't vlog like him and it's pretty impressive.

That's what I thought. This guy is good!