I'm french so I had to try it out! Although I got 90-100% on all words, I was able to get 50+% on most words doing what I think is a strong (but totally understandable) american accent in french. That was fun!
I'm French as well. When I saw the title of this post, I thought it was about how French you sound when you speak English, not how well you can speak French.
The thing is, there are a lot of very educated French people who, when they speak English, have an extremely accentuated French accent. Typically scientists and politicians. It's like they don't make any effort whatsoever or think that the French accent is some kind of honorific mark they should cultivate.
Me, I've always thought the French accent is the worst ever and I try my best to hide it because it makes me feel retarded.
I'm French, and speak American English natively (i.e., when people meet me they think I'm American and when I tell them I'm French it takes them a bit of time to believe me - "you mean, you have french parents but were born here?" etc.).
Most people don't realize that a language's accent is a physical thing. Your throat, nose, tongue behave differently when speaking different languages. If you're French, you can't speak English while keeping the same physical arrangement of your mouth and throat than when you speak French. So if you want to speak a language with a native accent, you have to experiment with all those parameters, and find what your voice sounds like in that language. For instance, my voice is a bit deeper in English than it is in French; this is particularly noticeable with my female friends who are speak both English and French natively - their voices tend to be very noticeably higher in French.
I've been learning Japanese, and it seems that I get best pronunciation results when my throat is in an even lower, more relaxed position than English. I intend to pick up mandarin at some point and am very much looking forward to experimenting with that, as I have no experience with strongly tonal languages.
Kids get this intuitively, but adults have a much harder time with it- it has to be taught consciously. Which is why most French people, even after living in an English speaking country for many years, retain a horrible French accent. We really ought to be teaching kids from the maternelle, much like many of our European neighbors do.
That being said, one thing I just have never been able to do are regional accents in languages I already speak. I cannot for the life of me speak with a northern French accent (my family's from the south, although I grew up in Lyon so have a mostly neutral accent), or a British accent.
> Most people don't realize that a language's accent is a physical thing.
Right! This is why I hate saying English words in the middle of German sentences. It's actually easier to just say them with the German accent, rather than take the effort to rearrange both my mouth and my brain.
Agree! But vice versa: I've been learning German for a few years and it's hard to dynamically reconfigure for the odd German place name or person while in the middle of English, but my German accent is actually pretty decent and don't want to let it get Americanized by laziness. The other way, speaking German and inserting English words with a German accent, is actually pretty comfortable, I find.
I usually get the impression people aren't really trying to match an accent. They're just trying to pronounce the letters and syllables as they would in their native language. Hence the stereotypical cringe-inducing "bonn-joor!" or "watashee wah soo-miss-oo dess-oo". Maybe it's because they haven't heard enough native pronunciation of the words (just like I mispronounce words I've only ever read in a book).
When I speak foreign languages I sort of subconsciously imitate characters I've heard speak in movies or shows. I'm always kind of worried my Japanese will sound like a mix of Naruto and Miyazaki characters.
As for regional accents, I find that's more a matter of knowing the little differences in certain words, like extending or shortening syllables, or rather strongly altering the key vowel (eg. Québecois 'nawn' vs. Parisian 'nohn' for 'non'). As you said, has a lot to do with mouth shapes.
For a lot of regional accents, I find you can fake things by transposing certain vowels. eg. for Australian transpose all the eh's (eg. get, head) into i's (eg. git, hid) and using soft r's (git me a beah mate). Whereas in my limited experience New Zealanders have a sharper change from e's to i's - it's almost "geet me a beah". And of course knowing the local slang - adding 'mate' to the end of your sentences just sounds more Australian.
> Most people don't realize that a language's accent is a physical thing. Your throat, nose, tongue behave differently when speaking different languages. If you're French, you can't speak English while keeping the same physical arrangement of your mouth and throat than when you speak French.
Interesting theory but as a counterexample in Switzerland in the western side of the country people speak French natively and generally their English accent is way better than the English accent in French people. I think it has a lot to do with the culture of the country; for example the protection of the language is not considered as important in Switzerland as it is in France. In France radio stations have minimun quota for French music, something unthinkable in Switzerland.
> Most people don't realize that a language's accent is a physical thing. Your throat, nose, tongue behave differently when speaking different languages.
As an example, if you read Irish writing and learn the Irish vowel and consonant sounds / rules you can't help speaking with an Irish accent. E.g. Dun Laoghaire is pronounced Dun Leary with an English accent, but if you read it properly it comes out in an Irish accent.
It's very strange how some people can add or drop accents at will, and others can move away from their home country at a young age and simply NEVER lose their accent.
I work for a company that moved from Paris to California, so we have a large number of native French speakers who still work with us; it's an interesting dynamic.
Accent is fluid and can change when you are young but by the time you are 15/16 it becomes difficult to "lose" your native accent regardless of the amount of exposure you have to a different language. This has been scientifically validated (can't find any relevant papers at the moment to link you to though).
He's not talking about losing it completely though. Some people are able to mostly lose their accent and sound relatively close to a native, others retain a very strong accent despite having lived in a new country for many years.
I find it strange too. My grandmother moved to England from Italy over 60 years ago but she sounds like she arrived a couple of weeks ago. I think it's a combination of wanting to maintain her Italian identity and talking daily/weekly to other people in Italian. It must take effort, even if subconsciously (e.g. wanting to fit in, thinking it affects the way people perceive you, not being understood etc), because it clearly doesn't happen automatically.
To be fair, I personally enjoy working in a diverse environment with so many accents, and at least for the european ones I don't have any trouble (international english is the working language, native english speakers are not a majority in my office and there are over 50 different countries represented). Personally unless I feel like people have trouble understanding me, I don't make too much effort to cover my (french) accent.
It's funny when you read the comments, I got the same issue when I move to UK, trying to hide my accent or let's say trying not to have an accent. What I learned is they don't mind your accent while you are trying to speak their English. The experience made me change the way I see others speaking/learning languages.
Nowadays it's all down to the communication and it's why I learn languages at the first place, being able to communicate and having fun learning from each other.
Unfortunately is not always the case in France, where we expect people to speak French as it should be, hopefully with more people travelling and having experiences abroad we will be more open when foreigners try to speak French.
> or think that the French accent is some kind of honorific mark they should cultivate
It impresses Americans, who unconciously assume anything European is more sophisticated. Go to a high-end restaurant in the U.S. and I'll bet your maitre d' has a European accent. Or just look at the top luxury brands; why is a Mercedes somehow more sophisticated than a Lexus? French wine more sophisticated than Californian?
I think an accent is perfectly fine (everybody has some kind of accent), as long as it doesn't significantly increase the effort for others to understand you. From my experience listening to some French people speaking English, you actually have to remind yourself that they are speaking English and not French. They might use English words and grammar, but it sounds like French, flowing from sentence to sentence with the typical melody.
> it sounds like French, flowing from sentence to sentence with the typical melody.
I've heard this described as stress-timed (English) vs syllable-timed (French) languages. Stress-timed meaning the time between stressed syllables is roughly equal, whereas syllable-timed means each syllable is roughly equal length.
You are completely right. Speaking French is actually more than a different set of words, a different grammar and an accent (it probably applies to a lot of other languages). It's also a different mindset. We tend to use a lot of words and expressions to say something that can be summed up in one word in English. Moreover, French people like to speak with images instead of words. So, a word-for-word translation from French to English, which is what most of us do, results in confusing sentences that are hard to follow. Even if I'm a native French speaker, I always have a hard time trying to understand my fellow Frenchies speaking English, but I might be biased...
The thing is, there are a lot of very educated French people who, when they speak English, have an extremely accentuated French accent. Typically scientists and politicians. It's like they don't make any effort whatsoever or think that the French accent is some kind of honorific mark they should cultivate.
Me, I've always thought the French accent is the worst ever and I try my best to hide it because it makes me feel retarded.