Becoming Fluent

by Richard M Roberts

  Accents, as one indicator of background and personal history, are a useful, necessary, and appropriate part of one’s speech pattern. We argue, therefore, that not only is it a waste of time and energy to try to get rid of your accent, it is actually counterproductive. We recommend instead that you embrace your accent. Show it off! By considering your accent an asset, as opposed to a liability, you will have more incentive to speak the language—which will in turn improve your level of fluency and your confidence.

  Clearly, if your speech is so heavily accented that you are unintelligible, or if your accent is so unusual that others focus not on what you say, but on how you say it, then you will need to work on improving your accent. Nothing is more frustrating than having to repeat a phrase or a word over and over—only to have the native speaker, when he finally does understand what you are trying to say, repeat it back to you in a way that sounds exactly the same. When this happens, of course you should pay attention to the subtle differences in pronunciation, stress, vowel length, or any other critical features that are important for your target language. But being able to articulate the sounds of the target language exactly like a native speaker is perhaps the most difficult part of learning a foreign language as an adult.

  Rather than spend an inordinate amount of time fighting against your accent, it is much better to capitalize on your advanced metacognitive skills to analyze where and how it interferes with intelligibility. Then find ways to work around these problems, given the accent you already have. For example, you could learn another word that expresses the same idea, but which you can more easily pronounce. There is no reason why you can’t choose words that fit comfortably into the way you speak. Or you can find a way to prime the listener for what you mean to say by providing more context. In Korean, for example, when Richard says the word for “translate” it often ends up sounding like the word for “violence”—and vice versa. But when he says “translator” it immediately becomes clear what he means because there is no such word as “violencer.” Over time, Richard may get better at distinguishing between violence and translation—but until then, he can at least minimize the likelihood that he will be misunderstood.

  There is, in fact, a word to describe foreign language learners who speak with an accent and choose for themselves the words, phrases, and pragmatic devices through which they express their own unique personality, even though this leaves their speech somewhat “foreign-sounding.” They are called charming.

  In Praise of Nonnative Speakers

  On May 29, 1953, Edmund Hillary reached the summit of Mount Everest. But he didn’t do it alone: he was accompanied every step of the way by the Nepalese Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay. Why didn’t Hillary climb Mount Everest alone? Because he needed someone who had previous experience climbing the mountain to help him navigate the dangerous terrain. In fact, at one point, Tenzing saved Hillary’s life. Learning another language must also be a team effort, and ideally the person by your side has already climbed that mountain and can show you how it’s done.

  Unfortunately, one of the most common beliefs when it comes to learning a language is that it can only be learned from a native speaker. And it is true that learning from a native speaker allows you to hear proper pronunciation and phrasing in a naturalistic way. But learning from a native speaker alone is like being guided up Mt. Everest by someone who was born at the top of the mountain and is shouting directions down from above. The sounds may be pronounced correctly, but that won’t help you find firm footing among the loose boulders and treacherous crevasses. What you need is a language Sherpa, if you will: a nonnative speaker who struggled with the language and who conquered it. This may seem counterintuitive, and it is not to suggest that learning from a native speaker is useless—far from it. However, there is much to be said for learning a language as an adult from someone who knows the terrain.

  Richard studied French in many different places, but the best French teacher he ever had was someone who was born and grew up in the United States, a person who had fallen in love with France and the French and had learned the language as an adult. This teacher understood how Americans approach French. And therefore, he knew how to teach French to Americans. He understood fully why Americans make the mistakes they do, because he had made them as well. As a result, he was able to give his students insider strategies for avoiding these mistakes.

  As metacognitive experts, adult language learners look for patterns and relationships among the sounds, words, phrases, and figures of speech in the target language. Therefore, it is important for adults to learn the target language from someone who can help them think strategically about it. Nonnative speakers who previously struggled with the language themselves often have insights into the language that native speakers do not have.

  For example, when it comes to building vocabulary, although it’s true that native speakers can tell you which words are common and which words are uncommon, they can’t always tell you which words will give you the most “bang for your buck.” Adult language learners, as strategic language learners, often seek out vocabulary words that can be used in the widest variety of settings. Experienced nonnative speakers will have discovered these words, and will already be capitalizing on them—and can easily teach them to you.

  Strangely, in the US educational system, fluent nonnative speakers often teach children and native speakers teach adults. We feel that this trend should be reversed. Adults can do well if they learn from highly fluent nonnative speakers who also learned the language as adults. By contrast, children greatly benefit from being instructed by native speakers, since their ability to learn a language without an accent is superior to that of adults. The best advice for adult foreign language learners is to seek out fluent nonnative speakers of a language to help think about, and strategize on, the most useful words, phrases, grammar patterns, and figures of speech in the target language.

  6

  Cognition from Top to Bottom

  Hearing Is Also Seeing

  In developing strategies to learn a foreign language effectively, it’s important to be aware of research that shows that some of our intuitions about listening and speaking are simply incorrect. For example, when we listen to someone speak, the subjective impression is that our ears do all the work, and that our eyes play little or no role in the process of comprehension. Of course, even though those of us with hearing impairments can achieve impressive levels of understanding through lip reading, most people think of that as a special skill that has no relevance to how those with normal hearing make sense of speech. But in fact, we are all lip readers to some degree. Not convinced? Perhaps some examples can help.

  A powerful demonstration of how hearing is also seeing can be demonstrated with something called the McGurk effect, named after (who else?) Harry McGurk, who published a paper on this phenomenon with John MacDonald (and like many important discoveries, it was stumbled upon by accident).1 We’re going to describe it to you, but we also urge you to look online for one of the many videos that demonstrate this effect. You can try it out first, or read about it and then view a demonstration. Incredibly, this is a perceptual effect where knowledge of what’s going on doesn’t alter your ability to experience a powerful illusion. Roger has shown this video to his perception class over several years, and is still amazed at how repeated demonstrations haven’t altered his experience of the effect. There are several examples on the Web, but we’ll describe the one that shows a long-haired, bearded man wearing rectangular granny glasses. You’ll know it when you see it.

  The video itself isn’t much to look at. You’ll see a closely cropped shot of the man’s face as he repeats one syllable six times. There’s a pause, and then the video loops back to the beginning. If you stare directly at the man’s mouth, you’ll hear him saying “da da, da da, da da.” Watch the video closely for several moments to convince yourself that these are the sounds the speaker is producing. Now all you need to do is close your eyes and continue listening
to the video. You should now hear something different—it sounds like the man has switched to saying “ba ba, ba ba, ba ba.” But how is that possible? It’s exactly the same video. In fact, if you open and close your eyes, you’ll hear the sounds change depending on whether you’re watching and listening, or just listening.

  As you may have begun to suspect, there’s a mismatch between the speaker’s lip movements and his voice on the soundtrack. The man’s voice really is saying “ba ba,” but what you’re seeing are the lip movements for “ga ga.” This mismatch can’t be detected when your eyes are closed, so you’re able to hear the sounds accurately. But when you both hear and watch the video, the perceptual system detects a mismatch, and does its best to reconcile the difference between what is being seen and what is being heard. Your brain tells you that you’re hearing “da da” because it’s the best perceptual solution for the mismatched perceptual inputs.

  By showing how vision and hearing can be tricked, the McGurk effect illustrates how the eyes and ears normally work together to create a more complete perceptual experience, even when we think we are just listening or just seeing. Because adult language learners benefit from having the fullest range of linguistic inputs possible, it is important to couple vision with listening during language learning whenever possible. Purely auditory learning materials by themselves provide a less rich, and therefore more challenging, learning environment.

  For example, when we speak on the telephone, a great deal of the acoustic energy that differentiates one sound from another is simply thrown away, largely owing to bandwidth limitations. Early telephone engineers were relieved to discover that, even though the speech signal was altered, it was still intelligible. This is analogous to ripping a track from a compact disk with your computer to create a smaller MP3 file. It’s possible to throw away the majority of the information encoded on the disk and still have a copy that sounds like your favorite song. That’s because the disk’s track contains extremely high and low frequencies that most people can’t hear anyway.

  What price do we pay for all of this compression? Not much, most of the time. Sure, your daughter’s voice sounds a bit tinny and unnatural as it comes through the tiny speaker of a mobile phone, but you can still understand her without too much difficulty. But you may also recall other occasions when there were problems. If you’ve ever tried to spell something during a phone call, it’s quite possible that the person at the other end wasn’t able to completely understand what you were saying. The high-frequency information that the phone company threw away is the culprit. Sounds like /f/ and /s/ are rarely confused in face-to-face speech, because you can hear the high-frequency sounds that differentiate them. But, as we’ve explained, those sounds are being clipped severely in the transmission process, and the truly awful microphones and speakers in many cell phones don’t help either.

  So if you’re sharing the news over the phone that your college-bound son was accepted by FSU (go Seminoles!), you may be met with confusion until you say something like “You know, F as in Frank, S as in Sam.” There’s a good reason why aviators and the military use phonetic alphabets (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, and so on). Admittedly, most of us aren’t trying to land a plane on the correct runway or giving orders over the din of battle, but the principle is the same.

  You probably haven’t thought too much about this because when you are speaking on the telephone in your native language and you experience difficulties, your prior knowledge of the language allows you to fill in any sounds that may be distorted or missing. Speaking on the telephone in your target language, however, means that you must rely more heavily on the sounds of the language only, since you may lack the contextual cues and background information that top-down processing would normally provide. Therefore, missing or distorted sounds or extraneous noise can easily derail your understanding in a language you don’t know well.

  You can experience another way that vision supplements hearing by watching television with the sound turned off. Tonight when you’re viewing a favorite program, try watching it without any sound for a few minutes, say between sets of commercials. (If your family members object, tell them you’re doing it for science.) Before you try it, estimate how well you think you’ll do. Most people respond to this question with very low estimates, and the claim is almost always the same: “I don’t know how to read lips.” If you’re like many, however, you might be pleasantly surprised by how much you are able to understand. Granted, you will probably miss a great deal, but that’s partly because of how most television programs are recorded. You’re typically seeing individuals in profile as they talk to each other, so you’re only seeing part of their faces. It’s quite likely, however, that even with this impediment, you will be able to make out many simple one-word utterances, like “Why?” or “No!”

  It’s been said that you can claim to be a fluent speaker of a foreign language when you can understand a joke told in that tongue or understand someone over the phone. Understanding jokes requires cultural and pragmatic knowledge, but now you understand why telephone conversations, radio programs, and audiotapes can present such a challenge. Being aware of how hearing and seeing work together can help improve your language-learning strategies. For example, when you’re having a conversation in your second language, look directly at your partner’s face so that you can see her articulate the sounds that make up each word. Also, choose study materials that allow you to see people speaking directly in addition to hearing their voices. It’s not always possible, and the effect may be subtle in some cases, but it will have a significant effect on improving your comprehension.

  Untranslatable

  One of the great joys of learning another language is encountering new concepts. People take great delight in discovering a concept in one language that is seemingly untranslatable into another. This is especially true when it comes to emotion words. The artist Pei-Ying Lin mapped the relationship between some of these culturally specific emotions in an innovative project called Unspeakableness. One untranslatable concept represented in the Unspeakableness project is the Welsh word hiraeth, which Lin defined as “Homesickness tinged with grief or sadness over the lost or departed and the earnest desire for the Wales of the past.”2

  Based on words like hiraeth, linguists, philosophers, and others have wondered to what extent language influences thought. In other words, does the language one speaks determine how one thinks? There is no simple answer to this question. Fortunately, however, the majority of concepts needed to function successfully in a foreign language overlap with concepts used in the native language, to some degree. There is no reason to learn these concepts as if they were completely new categories. Adults already have very well-developed sets of concepts and categories that they express through their native language. Therefore, it makes sense to treat concepts from the native language as prototypes for the concepts of the new language, with the understanding that differences between the boundaries of the two sets of concepts will be refined over time through exposure.3

  Put a different way, because words like hiraeth make up a minority of the many words one must learn in order to speak another language, whether growing up in Wales is the only way you can truly understand hiraeth is more of a theoretical, rather than a practical, consideration. To start learning Welsh, all you really need to know is that when someone talks about hiraeth, you know in general what it means to them.

  This is not to say that the impact of language on thought is unimportant or has no real-world implications. For example, how individuals solve problems may be influenced by whether they are thinking in their native language or a foreign language. It appears that speaking in a nonnative language can provide a sense of distance from a problem that leads individuals to make moral decisions less emotionally. Other studies have also found that using one’s native language to remember autobiographical events arouses more intense emotions than does remembering in a nonnative language. So be glad that there is not a perfect mapping
between your native and target languages. The similarities are close enough to get you started, and once you’re on your way, you’ll enjoy the differences so much you’ll never want to stop.4

  False Friends and Kissing Cousins

  An overarching theme of this book is that the adult foreign language learner can capitalize on what he already knows to assist in the learning of a new language. When it comes to vocabulary, this turns out to be true as well. If the only language you speak is English, you might be surprised to learn that you already know dozens, and perhaps hundreds, of words in several other languages. This happy fact is the result of the unusual history of English. At its heart, it’s a Germanic language, originally brought to the British Isles by invaders from what is now northern Germany and Denmark in the fifth century AD. Over time, this language, called Anglo-Saxon, became Old English, Middle English, and finally Modern English. Therefore, many of the basic terms in English are similar to words in modern German and the Scandinavian languages (which are also Germanic in origin). First-time students of German may be thrown by the idea of three genders for nouns or formidably multisyllabic words, but they will also encounter many old friends—Mann, Vater, Sommer, and Garten are all close enough to be recognized immediately as man, father, summer, and garden, to pick just a few of many possible examples.

  This doesn’t mean, however, that all similarities are helpful. Nestled among the words that seem so familiar to the native English speaker are a few that are actually quite different in meaning. They are often referred to as false friends (or more formally, false cognates). These exceptions can’t be anticipated or predicted—they must simply be learned as exceptions to the general rule that similar-looking words are similar in meaning.