I was just introduced to this by my friend (link here). It's a competition where candidates write and present 10-minute speeches about doing business with Japan in front of an audience (in Japanese). It seems like quite a prestigious award, and something you'd want on your CV if you require Japanese as part of your job.

You can view videos of winning candidates by clicking the links at the bottom. The standard seems pretty low, and the general level of pronunciation especially is quite shocking. There must be some learners on here who could do a better job. Anyone over 18 can enter, so get writing!

Edit: oh, and there are prizes too, including a trip to Japan and £1000 cash

Do you get to meet Spider Man?

Is it just me or does the 2010 first place winner sound like she's doing a speech for a school project rather than some international competition? It looks like she's trying to communicate with somebody whose skills are really low (like mine) and not a native jury.

thurd Wrote:It looks like she's trying to communicate with somebody whose skills are really low (like mine) and not a native jury.

I wonder if that's an artifact of having been educated in a system where most of her conversation partners have been her classmates who also didn't know much Japanese?

The winner's pronunciation seems okay to me. She's obviously trying extra hard to be understood but you would in a competition. (I dread to think what I sounded like during school poetry recitals).

All the finalists seem to be sad sacks in their 30s who work for horrible companies like "Valu-Trac Investment Management" and "Tokio Marine Asset Management". Whatever gets you through the day I guess.

What the... I just watched the video on the 2010 prizewinners page of the finalist dude. He has terrible pronunciation and an accent! I'm not even native and I can identify it!

If these speeches were ad lib, I'd be impressed, but.. meh... Not bad I guess.

edit: typo

Their accents may not be great but I hesitate to say I could do better. Achieving a native sounding accent seems to be quite rare. I was watching some English speaking contests on Youtube and even top contestants from national competitions in China still have noticeable accents and off pronunciation.

What are you all complaining about? They were great!

Let's take a look at the first 2010 winner. He starts:

"Minasama, konnichiwa."

This was very good, and I wouldn't reliably be able to tell if this person was foreign or not based on this opening sentence alone. The average Japanese would have voiced the vowels in "Mina", "from the chest", as it were, since stressing the correct vowels is imporant in Japanese. The stress and pacing on the "konnichiwa" is very good. Many foreigners tend to overstress the first "i" for some reason, but this person does not. He must've practiced this particular word a lot.

Second sentence: "Tadaima goshoukai wo itadakimashita."

"Tadaima"
Here, he made the mistake of speaking the "ai" in "tadaima" as though it were a dipthong, making it three syllables, "ta-dai-ma", instead of four. This is ok where "da" and "i" are part of the same word, for example, you can pronounce daikon as "dai-kon" without it being unnatural, but in this case, the "ai" occurs at the word break for "ただ今", so this sounds unnatural, and may even be misunderstood.

"goshoukai"
Flawless.

"itadakimashita"
This is good, but the pacing of "itadaki" is unnatural, almost a little singsong. I think this happens because learners will tend to "chunk" groups of sounds to help them remember long words, sort of like how phone numbers and credit card numbers that are broken up into pieces are easier to remember. Here, this speaker chunked the first part of the word as "ita-daki", and consequently, that's how it sounds when he says it, as opposed to it sounding evenly stressed like "i-ta-da-ki".

The "sh" in "mashita" is a bit too close to the English "sh". The Japanese "し" alone is a bit more towards the "s" end. The "sh" gets stressed like this only when し is paired with the やゆよ small kana, as in "しゅ". Interestingly, he pronounces し correctly about half the time for the rest of the speech, so does know how.

Generally, I'd consider flaws of the above type to be quite minor, and I wouldn't characterize them at all as being terrible.

sheetz Wrote:Their accents may not be great but I hesitate to say I could do better. Achieving a native sounding accent seems to be quite rare. I was watching some English speaking contests on Youtube and even top contestants from national competitions in China still have noticeable accents and off pronunciation.

just one of those things i guess. Accent doesn't matter too much nowadays, all that matters is being correct when speaking.

The Queen of England uses RevTK? She knighted Spiderman for his efforts in his many RTK stories.

I'm surprised the "Rate my pronunciation" thread died off, seeing how there are so many confident speakers in this thread.

No kidding. If you're not willing to put up some files of you giving a speech in front of an audience in Japanese, I don't see the need for all this petty sniping. Does it make you feel better about your own Japanese to criticize others?

wow, tough audience. :-) I think they did a great job. The Q&A part must have been particularly stressful. (Some would find that difficult even in their native language.)

Evil-Dragon Wrote:If these speeches were ad lib, I'd be impressed, but.. meh... Not bad I guess.

There's a Q&A session at the end of the speeches if you're curious about that.

mezbup Wrote:I wonder if that's an artifact of having been educated in a system where most of her conversation partners have been her classmates who also didn't know much Japanese?

Nah, folks don't learn advanced spoken Japanese from their classmates. (Sounds like one of those anti-classroom myths.)

Harhol Wrote:All the finalists seem to be sad sacks in their 30s who work for horrible companies like "Valu-Trac Investment Management" and "Tokio Marine Asset Management". Whatever gets you through the day I guess.

Um...it's a business Japanese competition. I think managing millions of dollars in Japan in Japanese might be a fairly interesting challenge. Using Japanese to negotiate deals involving different cultures and different laws doesn't sound too horrid to me either. I suspect these folks aren't located on the sad sack end of the continuum. (You should see them on the weekends!) ;p

ocircle Wrote:I'm surprised the "Rate my pronunciation" thread died off, seeing how there are so many confident speakers in this thread.

Maybe we already know our weaknesses. I've been told that my Japanese pronunciation has two flaws:

1. I don't know the stress differences between homophones such as 橋「はし」, bridge, and 箸「はし」, chopsticks.

2. I pronounce English katakana loanwords as though they were still in English, using sounds that don't exist in Japanese. For example, convenience store as "conveni" instead of "conbini", and Seattle as "Siatoru" instead of "Shiatoru".

And quite frankly, I have zero interest in correcting these problems, so I'm sure I'll have them all my life.

I sound horrible in Japanese. Although what I'm thinking of doing soon is me rehearsing anything in japanese and record it. And see how it lives up to the original. If I sound horrible to myself, then I'd sound even worse when others listen to how I speak! lol

Thora Wrote:

Harhol Wrote:All the finalists seem to be sad sacks in their 30s who work for horrible companies like "Valu-Trac Investment Management" and "Tokio Marine Asset Management". Whatever gets you through the day I guess.

Um...it's a business Japanese competition. I think managing millions of dollars in Japan in Japanese might be a fairly interesting challenge. Using Japanese to negotiate deals involving different cultures and different laws doesn't sound too horrid to me either. I suspect these folks aren't located on the sad sack end of the continuum.

It may be a business Japanese competition but it's still a Japanese competition. I was expecting at least one guy cosplaying as Rufus Shinra. But no, just a bunch of suits.

Thora Wrote:There's a Q&A session at the end of the speeches if you're curious about that.

Yeah, this year's winner is not too bad, but it's nothing too impressive either - at least to me. I've spoken to a handful of people who left a far greater impression on me, even though she's of course better than most non-natives I've met in Japan.
I can't speak for all of them though. Unfortunately my internet connection won't allow me to watch all of these videos in their entirety.

I just wanted to add that I've never understood the obsession that people seem to have with developing an accent that's indistinguishable from a native's. Such an accomplishment would seem to be little more than a parlor trick, or an exercise in doing impressions.

What's important is developing pronunciation that is easily understood. I accept that this and the "native accent" thing gets conflated sometimes, and I think that's understandable and fine, but everyone has an accent, and comes from somewhere. I'm not going to brush up on my southern drawl for a trip to Texas - they'll pick up on my Yankee origins, but they'll be able to understand me fine.

And accents from outside the country can be fine too. I have a colleague whose accent from northern India is more comprehensible than another colleague with an accent from Watertown, MA, for example.

harhol Wrote:It may be a business Japanese competition but it's still a Japanese competition. I was expecting at least one guy cosplaying as Rufus Shinra. But no, just a bunch of suits.

haha. But don't despair, Harhol, there's a cosplay competition in London you can sign up for! You can even win prizes!! You won't even need to speak, just pose!!

Mr. Takeda, Japan Cosplay Festival organizer Wrote:It is so cool that people enjoy doing and watching cosplay now. It is so cool that people can understand each other beyond language differences. If more and more people come to enjoy cosplay and understand each other through cosplay, cosplay will be a culture that can save the world and the planet!!! It will bring us peace!!!

Happy people saving the world!! So let's ditch this language study and get dressed!!

Mushi Wrote:I just wanted to add that I've never understood the obsession that people seem to have with developing an accent that's indistinguishable from a native's. Such an accomplishment would seem to be little more than a parlor trick, or an exercise in doing impressions.

What's important is developing pronunciation that is easily understood. I accept that this and the "native accent" thing gets conflated sometimes, and I think that's understandable and fine, but everyone has an accent, and comes from somewhere. I'm not going to brush up on my southern drawl for a trip to Texas - they'll pick up on my Yankee origins, but they'll be able to understand me fine.

And accents from outside the country can be fine too. I have a colleague whose accent from northern India is more comprehensible than another colleague with an accent from Watertown, MA, for example.

I'm sure many people agree and many studies have shown that having a certain accent gives an individual greater social respect. These accents are known as "prestige accents/dialects". For example, someone with a typical British accent is more likely to be judged as intelligent than someone with a different accent by American native speakers of English. For reasons like this, I understand why someone would want to resemble a native speaker with a prestige dialect. Discrimination is something worth avoiding.

vileru Wrote:I'm sure many people agree and many studies have shown that having a certain accent gives an individual greater social respect. These accents are known as "prestige accents/dialects". For example, someone with a typical British accent is more likely to be judged as intelligent than someone with a different accent by American native speakers of English. For reasons like this, I understand why someone would want to resemble a native speaker with a prestige dialect. Discrimination is something worth avoiding.

Ok, you've got me there. I have to admit that I'm prejudiced, and people from England sound unintelligent and low class to me - basically all chimneysweeps, scullery maids, and soccer hooligans.

BTW - Just kidding.

I think in general people are just much more impressed with you when you can speak with a very good accent and pronunciation.

Some people may have already seen this Youtube video of a Korean polyglot speaking English but I was really impressed with his accent given his claims to have never lived in an English speaking nation. In the video he discusses how he approaches language learning and how he improved his English pronunciation.

Mushi, I value accent more than anything else in a language.

If someone can communicate with an average level of speaking for a language learner, but with a flawless accent, he sounds much more fluent to me than someone who has a high level, but with a terrible accent.

I've met Chinese doctors who can speak speeches to English speakers about diseases, with bad accents. They just don't come across as intelligent, not because they are dumb, but their accent just sounds so lame.

Mushi Wrote:Second sentence: "Tadaima goshoukai wo itadakimashita."

I was surprised by this choice for a sentence.

ご紹介をさせていただきます is a more natural way to say that. Then again, I hear this every year in Japan whereas alot of the people in the contest seem to have limited exposure to Japanese.