“Lice or Rice” or “The Foreign Language and the Accent”
Long time ago in a faraway land named Japan, a young lady was being asked by her Japanese host mother, if she wanted to eat some lice. Needless to say she was horrified! Japanese eat lice! How disgusting! She thought to herself. As she looked at her host mother she quickly realized that she was trying to say rice and not lice! This was my first experience many years ago with accents. This is when I realized how important accents are.
What is an accent? The Oxford Advanced Learner 's Dictionary defines accents as a distinctive mode of pronunciation of a language, especially one associated with a particular nation, locality, or social class. Basically, it is the way you speak. A person will have an accent when they use some of the rules or sounds of the native tongue to speak a second language.
Why do people have accents? There are over 800 different phonemes in human speech. A phoneme is the smallest distinct unit of sound in a language that will distinguish one word from another. As babies, humans can hear all phonemes, however as they learn their native tongue they rapidly develop a preference …show more content…
This took hours of study and concentration. It also caused a lot of stress to these language learners. By having this stress of a native accent, many language learners would feel embarrassed knowing they were unable to achieve this goal so they would avoid speaking whenever possible. The truth is native speakers really don’t care if your accent is perfect or not. What they do care about is whether or not they can understand you. Today, the language learner’s goal is based on the intelligibility principle. This principle concentrates less on individual sounds and more on the big picture of the language, like speaking habits, volume, stress and rhythm, in other words, learning to speak a foreign language well enough to be comprehended by
Long time ago in a faraway land named Japan, a young lady was being asked by her Japanese host mother, if she wanted to eat some lice. Needless to say she was horrified! Japanese eat lice! How disgusting! She thought to herself. As she looked at her host mother she quickly realized that she was trying to say rice and not lice! This was my first experience many years ago with accents. This is when I realized how important accents are.
What is an accent? The Oxford Advanced Learner 's Dictionary defines accents as a distinctive mode of pronunciation of a language, especially one associated with a particular nation, locality, or social class. Basically, it is the way you speak. A person will have an accent when they use some of the rules or sounds of the native tongue to speak a second language.
Why do people have accents? There are over 800 different phonemes in human speech. A phoneme is the smallest distinct unit of sound in a language that will distinguish one word from another. As babies, humans can hear all phonemes, however as they learn their native tongue they rapidly develop a preference …show more content…
This took hours of study and concentration. It also caused a lot of stress to these language learners. By having this stress of a native accent, many language learners would feel embarrassed knowing they were unable to achieve this goal so they would avoid speaking whenever possible. The truth is native speakers really don’t care if your accent is perfect or not. What they do care about is whether or not they can understand you. Today, the language learner’s goal is based on the intelligibility principle. This principle concentrates less on individual sounds and more on the big picture of the language, like speaking habits, volume, stress and rhythm, in other words, learning to speak a foreign language well enough to be comprehended by