undead_saif Wrote:About the songs thing. On purpose I didn't generalize my experience acquiring English on Japanese because they sound different and so I might be wrong.

But the thing with songs that made me mention them here is, they're totally out of the studying area! I walk a lot, and if the songs are already playing, why not make good use of them?
So, I got something from nothing! That indeed is worth mentioning.

There is no reason to believe the effect of songs would be any different depending on the language, other than the fact that tones and pitches (and stress, to a degree) are lost, making it perhaps more efficient for languages like French or Korean that have no such features.

As for an activity that requires no material or specific location, you can't beat self-talk.

You can when you're in public. XD

AlexandreC Wrote:

kazelee Wrote:So... there are more vowels, the speakers of the the language just don't classify it as so?

Interesting.

Every vowel of every language allows for some variation in its pronunciation; it doesn't mean there are more vowels since the language classifies this as a single vowel.

But in another language it might be classified as a separate vowel?

kazelee Wrote:

AlexandreC Wrote:

kazelee Wrote:So... there are more vowels, the speakers of the the language just don't classify it as so?

Interesting.

Every vowel of every language allows for some variation in its pronunciation; it doesn't mean there are more vowels since the language classifies this as a single vowel.

But in another language it might be classified as a separate vowel?

Yes, or the other way around. But if you want to count vowels that way, you'll have to conclude that any language has as many vowels as all languages combined.

So... wouldn't it have just been easier to explain this instead of saying that you don't see why I would think it sounds as if there are more than 5 vowels in Japanese?

Alexandre Wrote:As for an activity that requires no material or specific location, you can't beat self-talk.

Splatted Wrote:You can when you're in public. XD

haha Gaijin will become synonymous with schizophrenic.

About the role of music in language learning -

There was some discussion here about this, as I recall. In addition to motivation and possibly emotional resonance, the rhythm, melody, rhyming and repetition all help with learning words, phrases and some grammar. They're memory aids.

It's the reason children use nursery rhymes and Dr Suess type books have that rhythm and rhyme. Oral cultures pass down their history and sacred texts in forms of chant and song. If someone gives you a line from a song you once liked, you can probably still sing a chunk of it. I can still remember the songs we were taught in high school French classes. Music is a popular technique in language education.

Songs may not be ideal for achieving natural prosody, but they can help beginners overcome their tendency to speak in individual words. Their main value, though, seems to be in acquiring useful language chunks and grammar. You need to find useful and understandable lyrics, though. Many aren't.

Commonly used language chunks and grammar are components of speech. Learning and singing songs are effective ways to make some of that available for use. I don't think anyone is suggesting songs ought to be used at the exclusion of other speech/prosody practice. Someone doing both might very well fare better than someone doing only speech exercises. (In other words, I think some of you are just using narrower/wider definitions of speech.)

fwiw, some opera singers credit years of singing in languages they don't speak with facilitating their later acquisition of those languages.

kazelee Wrote:So... wouldn't it have just been easier to explain this instead of saying that you don't see why I would think it sounds as if there are more than 5 vowels in Japanese?

I assumed the concept of vowel was obvious, which it isn't, I realize. Your comment "Listen to enough of both languages and you'll start to wonder if that's actually true" was misleading too, as if you recognized it was 5 despite it not feeling so. Nevertheless, I hope my explanation helped.

Thora Wrote:

Alexandre Wrote:As for an activity that requires no material or specific location, you can't beat self-talk.

Splatted Wrote:You can when you're in public. XD

haha Gaijin will become synonymous with schizophrenic.

Lol, that reminds me of a guy I read about who did like to practice his speaking in public. He said it had been the beginning of many interesting conversations and even some lasting friendships. You've got to admire his guts. XD

Standard Japanese has 5 phonemes for vowels, each of which has at least 2 allophonic variations, notable examples being voiced and unvoiced ones. Another important example of allophones in Japanese vowels would be how う in standard Japanese becomes more like the kind of う used in the Kansai dialect when it follows certain consonants such as b or when it takes 2 moras (i.e., うー).

By definition, using the wrong allophone won't change the meaning of a word. Also, unlike English, vowel formant frequencies and articulations don't carry a regional accent feel very much. This also applies to consonants. It does make it harder to understand if you use allophones randomly or the way your native language uses them or if you use sounds that are completely foreign to the Japanese language in the first place. But it shouldn't create a significant barrier.

What really makes it sound like you have a regional accent is nonstandard pitch accent. Also, pureness of each vowel quality is quit important if you don't want to sound foreign, especially if you're having trouble pronouncing pure vowels like the vast majority of native English speakers. If you screw up one of these aspects, the word you're saying may sound like a totally different one to a native speaker. You might not sound like speaking Japanese if your accent is too thick. I don't think you can learn these two aspects very well through songs (This is because songs don't have pitch accent for obvious reasons plus the fact that Japanese use diphthongs in songs unlike normal conversation.), though I wouldn't say songs are useless for language learning. If anything, I think music is fun and possibly effective learning material if you know its limitations.

Edit: Phoneme: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoneme
Allophone: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allophone

hey 魔が藻, 久しぶり。

magamo Wrote:Also, pureness of each vowel quality is quit important if you don't want to sound foreign, especially if you're having trouble pronouncing pure vowels like the vast majority of native English speakers.

What do you mean by "pureness of each vowel quality"? Do you just mean pronouncing them correctly? I think what's initially hard for English speakers is managing to pronounce the vowels correcting for every syllable in a sentence. The rapid vowel changes can trip you up at first because in English we tend to only pronounce the vowel strictly for the stressed syllables. Every other vowel tends to get slurred to a 'ə' sound, but we're usually stricter about consonants (except maybe americans). Is this what you mean?

Not sure if this is what magamo is talking about, but I know that native English speakers have problems with え　and お　because in English, those vowels turn into diphthongs when they're tense. (I suspect this is the reason why people with no knowledge of Japanese says "saki" for sake and "karioki" for karaoke.)

In English, we have the sounds in "pet" and "pot," which are lax vowels. And we have the sounds in "bait" and "boat," which are tense vowels, but they're also diphthongs -- we say [beit] and [bout]. The Japanese vowels are tense but they're not diphthongs. If you compare "boat" to ボート　or "table" to テーブル -- in the English words, your tongue actually moves to a different position as you're pronouncing the vowel, but with Japanese it's the same throughout.

(And this is why Japanese textbooks don't seem to agree on whether え is the sound in "pen" or in "pain")

If you want to know what it sounds like when an English native speaker speaks Japanese and his vowels are not sounding pure, listen to Peter on Jpod101...

But seriously, that's why Italians, Germans and Spaniards (initially at least) have a much better accent in Japanese: they have the あいえおう sounds in their own language.

I would think that difficulty with pure vowels is among the most important reasons why very, very few native English speakers lose their accent in any foreign language, and almost never in Japanese. Conversely, it's among the most important reasons why very few Italians, Germans, Spaniards and Japanese almost never lose their accents in English (and it doesn't make a difference if they're trying to speak Queen's English or Standard American).

Ah ok. I get it now. Yeah I agree that a lot of gaijin do continue to get these sounds wrong for quite a long time, for reasons that aren't quite clear to me. Getting the vowels right in isolation is really not that hard even for relative beginners. I wonder if the problem comes from primarily learning from text and not realising that the hiragana pronunciation explained in dictionaries/textbooks is not very accurate. It might also just be my observation, but I've noticed Americans often have worse accents than aussies/brits. (Do american varieties of english use a lower range of phonemes or something?)

nadiatims Wrote:What do you mean by "pureness of each vowel quality"?

By pureness, I mean how a monophthong doesn't change its quality from its onset to the end. English monophthongs can sound like diphthongs to native Japanese speakers because Japanese vowels are all monophthongs that are completely pure (i.e., they keep the exact same quality throughout utterance) while some English monophthongs tend to make slight gliding sound changes. In fact, some English vowels that are perceived as monophthongs by native English speakers are actually diphthongs in the linguistic sense.

For example, as others said, え and お tend to be realized as diphthongs "eh" and "oh" in open syllables, which are obviously not pure vowels. (If you don't know what open syllables are, they're syllables that end with vowels. Every Japanese mora except ん is an open syllable in a sense.) So these two vowels sound like えい and おう respectively. If you actually want to say えい because, for example, you want to say 映画 (えいが), it should take 2 moras (3 moras for the entire word). But native English speakers tend to cram the two distinct sounds into one mora as you would into one syllable when pronouncing "say," "pay" and so on.

It's quite difficult to explain these things in detail without linguistic jargon, especially when people who do need detailed explanations can't even hear the difference. But the point is that you're supposed to speak Japanese sort of like Spanish.

As for American English vs. other dialects, I don't think it matters much as far as how native Japanese speakers perceive your accent. In fact, your average Japanese person can't even hear the difference between typical British and American accents. They sound pretty much the same to the untrained Japanese ear. As I said in the previous post, vowel qualities just don't matter as long as you use equivalent monophthongs. I can't stress this enough, but they don't contribute much to how your accent sounds. The wrong pitch accent and wrong use of moras are the culprit. Accent doesn't work the English way in Japanese.

Edit: If you didn't know the term "pure vowel" and are a native English speaker, I strongly recommend you learn a little bit of phonetics and phonology first. "Impure" vowels in your Japanese is a dead giveaway that you're not a native speaker while lots of non-English speakers have no problem.

Edit 2: Neither English nor Japanese is a tonal language. But this doesn't mean each syllable is completely monotonous or perfectly flat pitch-wise. "Non-tonal language" simply means that tones are not used to distinguish phonemes. There are tonal pitch shits in English too, though whatever tone you use it doesn't change the fact that "ah" is "ah" and "ee" is "ee." But you're certainly using a particular set of tones in a semi-systematic way; phonological and prosodic context dictates which tone you tend to use. So, if you use the kind of tone you always use in English (and follow the English rules for tones) when speaking Japanese, your Japanese will sound accented.

@OP

I do this as well, except that I only listen to shows that I've subs2srs'd. This lets me squeeze in an extra 30-60 minutes of listening per day. I would like to shadow though, but don't to avoid looking like a crazy person during my commute. When nobody is around I'll shadow, but even then only the sentences I know.

@Magamo
thanks for the thorough explanation.

I'd never heard the term "pure vowel" before. I think I'm getting the vowels correct though, as everything you've described are things I myself identify with the anglo gaijin accent.

magamo Wrote:For example, as others said, え and お tend to be realized as diphthongs "eh" and "oh" in open syllables, which are obviously not pure vowels.

magamo Wrote:But native English speakers tend to cram the two distinct sounds into one mora as you would into one syllable when pronouncing "say," "pay" and so on.

I think both of these problems mainly occur amongst beginners/intermediates or advanced speakers who have had insufficient listening practice (probably having primarily studied using text) and haven't yet made the connection that japanese mora don't sound exactly like they're described in textbooks, usually via english words (that or they're just a little slow on the uptake...) I don't think the pure vowels are actually difficult to pronounce if someone actually teaches how they really sound or one gets plenty of listening practice.

I think there's a stage which people inevitably go through where the words they understand on paper massively outnumber the words they can comprehend in native speech. When people at this stage speak, they're digging into their brains and remembering kanji or how words are spelled and then saying words that they've haven't really heard much or not at all. These words, aren't embedded into their brains yet as sounds, but rather as instructions to be turned into sound, instructions that are incomplete anyway and which often get processed wrongly by beginners. (Even advanced speakers are likely to make some mistakes of course but they become less frequent in my experience)

There's a pretty big difference when you're able to speak fluently and able to easily understand native speech. At that point, you start in a sense relearning words and phrases and things as they actually sound.

edit:
re: americans

I was curious if (U.S) Americans really do speak using less phonemes. I just read through the wiki article on american English and this stood out (just relating to vowels):

wikipedia Wrote:The merger of /ɑ/ and /ɒ/, making father and bother rhyme. This change is nearly universal in North American English.

The merger of /ɑ/ and /ɔ/.[citation needed] This is the so-called cot–caught merger, where cot and caught are homophones.

The replacement of the lot vowel with the strut vowel in most utterances of the words was, of, from, what and in many utterances of the words everybody, nobody, somebody, anybody; the word because has either /ʌ/ or /ɔ/;[11] want has normally /ɔ/ or /ɑ/, sometimes /ʌ/.

Vowel merger before intervocalic /ɹ/. Which vowels are affected varies between dialects, but the Mary-marry-merry, nearer-mirror, and hurry–furry mergers are all widespread. Another such change is the laxing of /e/, /i/ and /u/ to /ɛ/, /ɪ/ and /ʊ/ before /ɹ/, causing pronunciations like [pɛɹ], [pɪɹ] and [pjʊɹ] for pair, peer and pure. The resulting sound [ʊɹ] is often further reduced to [ɝ], especially after palatals, so that cure, pure, mature and sure rhyme with fir.

The pin–pen merger, by which [ɛ] is raised to [ɪ] before nasal stops, making pairs like pen/pin homophonous. This merger originated in Southern American English but is now also sometimes found in parts of the Midwest and West as well, especially in people with roots in the mountainous areas of the Southeastern United States.

nadiatims Wrote:

wikipedia Wrote:The merger of /ɑ/ and /ɒ/, making father and bother rhyme. This change is nearly universal in North American English.

Huh? They don't rhyme in New England as far as I can tell (based on a quick check with colleague from Massachusetts) and they certainly don't rhyme in Canada.

Well they rhyme when I put on my fake American accent...

Irixmark Wrote:

nadiatims Wrote:

wikipedia Wrote:The merger of /ɑ/ and /ɒ/, making father and bother rhyme. This change is nearly universal in North American English.

Huh? They don't rhyme in New England as far as I can tell (based on a quick check with colleague from Massachusetts) and they certainly don't rhyme in Canada.

They do rhyme in Canada, at least for most Canadians, including in the standard Canadian English we hear on TV.

Hyperborea Wrote:

AlexandreC Wrote:

Irixmark Wrote:Huh? They don't rhyme in New England as far as I can tell (based on a quick check with colleague from Massachusetts) and they certainly don't rhyme in Canada.

They do rhyme in Canada, at least for most Canadians, including in the standard Canadian English we hear on TV.

I was born and grew up in and around Toronto and they never rhymed. They do rhyme here in California where I currently live.

If that's so, you guys need to change Wikipedia's "nearly universal in North American English"

AlexandreC Wrote:They do rhyme in Canada, at least for most Canadians, including in the standard Canadian English we hear on TV.

What you hear on TV in Canada is mostly standard American, unless you watch Strombo. In standard American they do rhyme -- Longman's pronunciation dictionary confirms that. They don't rhyme even for someone from BC like me.

But before this turns into a Canadiana thread, I wonder if there is such a thing as a standard pronunciation dictionary for Japanese, with phonetic symbols and all?

Irixmark Wrote:

AlexandreC Wrote:They do rhyme in Canada, at least for most Canadians, including in the standard Canadian English we hear on TV.

What you hear on TV in Canada is mostly standard American, unless you watch Strombo. In standard American they do rhyme -- Longman's pronunciation dictionary confirms that. They don't rhyme even for someone from BC like me.

But before this turns into a Canadiana thread, I wonder if there is such a thing as a standard pronunciation dictionary for Japanese, with phonetic symbols and all?

NHK and Shinmeikai have pitch accent dictionaries. That's about the only thing that needs to be clarified about Japanese pronunciation since words that aren't pronounced the way they are spelled are extremely rare (provided kanji are transcribed of course).

Irixmark Wrote:

AlexandreC Wrote:They do rhyme in Canada, at least for most Canadians, including in the standard Canadian English we hear on TV.

What you hear on TV in Canada is mostly standard American, unless you watch Strombo. In standard American they do rhyme -- Longman's pronunciation dictionary confirms that. They don't rhyme even for someone from BC like me.

A friend from the Prairies confirmed they rhyme.

AlexandreC Wrote:A friend from the Prairies confirmed they rhyme.

Canadian

http://alt-usage-english.org/archive/bother9.mp3

vs Midwestern US

http://alt-usage-english.org/archive/am2.mp3

Although I have a suspicion that the Canadian is from the Maritimes, and the vowels there have a Scottish influence.

AlexandreC Wrote:

Irixmark Wrote:But before this turns into a Canadiana thread, I wonder if there is such a thing as a standard pronunciation dictionary for Japanese, with phonetic symbols and all?

NHK and Shinmeikai have pitch accent dictionaries. That's about the only thing that needs to be clarified about Japanese pronunciation since words that aren't pronounced the way they are spelled are extremely rare (provided kanji are transcribed of course).

Erm... I rather think there are other things that need to be clarified, since differences in pronunciation are exactly why we just had a bit of a fuss over what exactly a vowel is, and we got this important contribution near the end of that:

magamo Wrote:Standard Japanese has 5 phonemes for vowels, each of which has at least 2 allophonic variations, notable examples being voiced and unvoiced ones. Another important example of allophones in Japanese vowels would be how う in standard Japanese becomes more like the kind of う used in the Kansai dialect when it follows certain consonants such as b or when it takes 2 moras (i.e., うー).

Now, I don't have a pitch accent dictionary (yet, though it's quickly going up in my priorities, and pitch accents are marked in 大辞林 but nothing else about pronunciations is... I don't think.) so, I don't know if a pitch accent dictionary would also mark which vowels are devoiced. I've only seen devoiced vowels marked in language learning resources for foreigners (I think I might have a romaji dictionary buried somewhere that marks devoiced vowels and pitch accent, or at least I've leafed through one at one point.) I've never seen any marking (or description of) these other allophonic variations that magamo refers to. I'd love to have such a dictionary. Although, if one's ear is well enough trained the sound of an electronic version of an accent dictionary should be sufficient. (Or possibly the EDICT sound files... although those are Tokyo accent not standard, I think?)

As an aside, I'd also love to get ahold of regional accent resources for other regions, but I don't think there are accent dictionaries for other accents (although I haven't actually researched that.)